Crime Junkie - MURDERED: María Marta García Belsunce Part 1
Episode Date: April 1, 2024When tragedy strikes in a wealthy Argentinian community, the suspicions of the nation fall squarely on the victim’s own family, and the case takes on a life of its own. This is Part 1 of 2. Listen t...o Part 2 NOW in the Fan Club!Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit: crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-maria-marta-garcia-belsunce-part-1 Did you know you can listen to this episode ad-free? Join the Fan Club! Visit https://crimejunkie.app/library/ to view the current membership options and policies.Don’t miss out on all things Crime Junkie!Instagram: @crimejunkiepodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @CrimeJunkiePod | @audiochuckTikTok: @crimejunkiepodcastFacebook: /CrimeJunkiePodcast | /audiochuckllc Crime Junkie is hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat. Instagram: @ashleyflowers | @britprawatTwitter: @Ash_Flowers | @britprawatTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at (317) 733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!
Transcript
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Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host Ashley Flowers.
And I'm Britt.
And the story I have for you today is a cautionary tale.
One about assumptions and rushed judgments and games of telephone that spiral out of
control and how all of these things can cloud our vision and make us miss what's right
there in front of us.
This is the story of Maria Marta Garcia Belsunce. It's a little before 7 p.m. on a Sunday in late October 2002, when a 50-something-year-old retired
stockbroker named Carlos Carrascosa is driving the few short blocks home from his in-laws'
house.
And by the way, when I say in-laws, I'm talking about his wife, Maria Marta's half-sister
Irene and her husband Guillermo.
So like not her parents kind of in-laws.
Got it.
Anyways, Carlos and Guillermo are buddies and they had spent the evening watching
a huge national soccer match together,
like pretty much everyone else there in Argentina.
When Carlos pulls into his driveway,
he's a little surprised to see one
of his neighborhood security guards, Jose Ortiz.
He's parked in a golf cart out front,
and he's also confused that there aren't any other cars
parked in the driveway, other
than Maria Marta's, because he knows that she had a massage scheduled for 7 p.m. at
the house.
It's part of her weekly routine.
But as soon as he talks to Jose, he finds out why.
Jose explains that Beatriz, the masseuse, is at the entrance of their gated community,
waiting to be let in.
But the guards haven't been able to reach Maria Marta on the phone.
And she's waiting at the entrance because this is the type of neighborhood where
guests have to be authorized to enter.
So this guard says that he stopped by to see if he'd have better luck knocking on
the front door, but he kind of got the same thing, no answer.
Now, Carlos doesn't quite know what's up, but he gives Jose the go ahead, go ahead,
let Beatriz in, because he knows this is his wife's plan.
I mean, she told him as much when she stopped by her sisters
while they were watching the game.
She said her tennis match had gotten rained out,
she was going to go home and take a bath
before the masseuse arrived.
So he's thinking, okay,
maybe she's still just in the bath or something,
didn't hear the phone, didn't hear the door.
But before he even enters the house,
he is surprised yet again, because he realizes that the door. But before he even enters the house, he is surprised yet again because he realizes that
the door is unlocked.
And I think that's kind of unusual for like their normal routine.
So he's climbing the stairs, yelling out for his wife, getting no response.
And when he reaches the top, he sees that their bedroom is full of steam.
But it's not until he steps in
and gets a peek into the ensuite bathroom
that he realizes that something is wrong.
Something is very wrong.
Because his eye is immediately drawn
to a pool of blood on the bathroom floor.
He races into the bathroom, and that's when he sees her.
There is his wife, fully dressed,
but draped over the side of the tub,
face down in the water. And the water isn't clear like it should be. It is crimson, blood red.
Panicked and confused, he pulls her out, lays her down on the floor in the doorway between the
bathroom and the bedroom, and just then he hears tires outside on the gravel driveway.
It's the masseuse, Beatriz.
So he runs to the window and yells at her to come in, that Maria Marta had had some
kind of accident and he needs her help.
So where is this blood coming from?
Well, it looks like it's coming from her head, and there is a lot of it.
So Beatriz runs in, she starts trying to resuscitate Maria Marta, and Carlos races to
the phone. He picks it up and he dials Irene and Guillermo. Uh, how about calling for an ambulance?
It's a little strange, but he later explains in an interview for the Netflix docu-series on this
case that his mind is just completely blank at this point. And to be fair, I actually don't know if Argentina
even has a 911 type emergency service line in 2002.
I know they do now, but I actually don't think they do
at the time because he also mentions having to find a number
for an ambulance once he hangs up with Irene and Guillermo.
Anyways, Guillermo gets there first
and Irene isn't far behind,
and she asks if they've called for an ambulance.
And I think Carlos might actually be on the phone with the emergency services at that
point trying to give them directions to the neighborhood.
And Irene says all she can think to do is to try and go find a doctor.
So she runs out into the street hoping she'll see the ambulance maybe speeding in.
There's no sign of one anywhere though, not even the sound of sirens in the distance.
So she runs to the house of a medical student and begs him to come back to Carlos and Maria
Marta's with her, which he does, and then he takes over the resuscitation attempts.
An ambulance finally pulls up at 7.28 p.m. Inside is Dr. Juan Gouvery Gordone,
and he asks what happened as he begins administering
adrenaline shots and shocks with the defibrillator trying to revive Maria Marta.
Carlos immediately says that there had been some kind of terrible accident.
Maria Marta must have hit her head on the low slung ceiling beams above the bathtub
and passed out, or maybe she passed out and then struck her head maybe on the bathtub faucet,
but whatever happened, it definitely involved a blow to the head. And I assume he's saying
that because of all the blood coming from her head. And honestly, to Carlos, this is the only
explanation that makes sense because he'd actually seen something like this before.
His mom relied on sleeping pills and alcohol to sleep, and one morning she had been disoriented and tripped
and hit her head on the bathroom sink.
Carlos was actually the one who found her sprawled out
on the floor unconscious.
Now she survived, but I mean, it was a serious injury.
She had like permanent brain damage from it.
I mean, yeah, so this is like literally a scene
that he's like seen before it's happening all over again.
Now by the time a second ambulance pulls in at 743 with another doctor named Santiago
Biasi, it is clear that Maria Marta is beyond saving.
Everyone gathers in the living room, almost stunned into silence.
It is then that Dr. Gouvery Gourdain makes a fateful request to Beatriz,
one that he will actually come to regret.
The scene upstairs is shocking.
I mean, there is just so much blood and the doctor doesn't want Carlos or
the rest of the family to have to see that.
At least not again, especially now knowing that Maria Marta is gone.
So he asked Beatriz to grab a bucket
and grab some towels and clean things up.
But he does what now?
Yeah, and I mean, no one tells Beatriz not to
and no one thinks to like stop her.
So she does what she's asked by this doctor.
She heads upstairs, she cleans up the bloody scene.
And actually, according to that other doctor, Dr. Biasi,
Dr. Gouvery Gordon himself cleans up Maria Marta,
wiping blood from her face and head.
And it's interesting because that night actually turns
into a kind of vigil for Maria Marta's family and friends.
Now that she's cleaned up, I mean, she almost looks peaceful.
So the family dresses her in clean clothes.
They lay her out on her bed for visitors to pay their respects, say their goodbyes, which isn't anything I've
really seen before, but it made me wonder if culturally this is the norm. And I tried
to figure it out for myself online. I wasn't having much luck. Then I was like, had this
moment where I was like, oh, duh, we have amazing crime junkies all over the world.
We even have some from Argentina.
Which like, of course we do. It will never stop being cool that crime junkies all over the world. We even have some from Argentina. Which like, of course we do.
It will never stop being cool that crime junkies are just everywhere.
I know, it's amazing.
And I actually found a crime junkie that totally came through.
She said that she has never seen it happen, but she asked her parents,
and they said it was totally standard back in the day to have a wake in the house
for someone who had died at the home.
So I just think it's important to have a wake in the house for someone who had died at the home.
So I just think it's important to have those like cultural contexts because like again we would we would see that and be like oh my god so suspicious but actually turns out this is not that abnormal
effort at the time and for the place. So family and friends are milling in and out all night
and the inner circle which is Carlos, the family, her closest friends,
they decide that they want to hold her funeral the next day on Monday, October 28.
But in order to hold a funeral, they will need a death certificate.
Neither Dr. Gourvie-Gordon or Dr. Biassi will issue one.
So Guillermo and a close family friend named Michael Taylor volunteer to find a funeral home that will issue a death certificate on a Sunday night without examining her body.
This is super weird though, right?
Yeah, just wait. So the first place that they go to is like,
yeah, we're not gonna give you a rush job funeral or like a rush job death
certificate either. Like you're gonna need a proper medical exam.
But Guillermo and Michael are like,
nah, no thank you on that medical exam,
like we need to keep things moving.
So they take off to the Capitol to find a place that will.
So they're just like pathologist shopping.
Basically, and they do get what they're shopping for.
Because they find a place that without even seeing
Maria Marta, they're willing to give them a death certificate to take home.
Which...
What?
In my mind, like, how?
You can't even tell that the person's actually dead if you can't see them.
Yeah, I'm like, forget the exam.
Can I just go and be like, um, my best friend, Britt, I'm going to need a piece of paper.
To me...
Wait, like, this person isn't even there to check a pulse.
No.
No. Even to take a look, forget the pulse.
Like the whole thing is just screaming fishy.
But it's not until the next morning
that someone else begins to get that feeling too.
And that's Maria Marta's half brother, John.
He calls their brother, Horacio, and is like,
hey, maybe we should have a trained pathologist
take a look at Maria Marta's body after all.
Uh, yeah, you think?
Well, Orasio doesn't.
He thinks it's unnecessary.
But he happens to be a relatively high-profile journalist,
meaning that he does have connections,
and he doesn't wanna just blow his brother off.
So he basically calls up a personal friend
who is also a top-ranking national judicial official.
He explains the situation, and the friend is like, okay, my man, no problem.
Let me get the provincial police on the line.
We'll get someone out there to take a look at things.
We'll put your brother's mind at ease.
Soon enough, a young prosecutor by the name of Diego Molina Pico and the on-duty police
commissioner are at Maria Marta and Carlos' house
where the family has all gathered again.
Diego takes a look at Maria Marta's cleaned up body.
He talks with the family.
Everything seems like it checks out.
And it looks to him like her death was the accident
that the family says it was.
But he agrees to do just kind of a cursory investigation
anyway, just to make sure everything is on the up and up.
But it's clearly just a formality to everyone because he gives the family the go-ahead to
bury Maria Marta that day like they planned.
So do they do the autopsy or not?
No, no autopsy.
Diego is just going to look into the circumstances around her death.
He's basically fine accepting most of the facts as is.
He's just going to like schedule some time to interview everyone,
check some boxes, you know what I mean?
Just like, go through the motions a little bit.
But it doesn't take long for him to regret that decision
because when he interviews Dr. Biasi,
that second emergency doctor who was there that night,
the story he tells has Diego shook.
So shook, in fact, that Diego ends up cutting him off mid-sentence so that he can go grab
his secretary, and he brings her in and makes Dr. Biasi start the whole thing over again
because he needs someone else to hear this.
According to Dr. Biasi, Maria Marta's death wasn't an accident at all.
Couldn't have
been further from it.
In the Netflix docu-series, which is called Carmel, Who Killed Maria Marta?, the English
translation of the phrase that he uses to describe it is a quote, violent and dubious
death.
Because he says when he attended to her body, there wasn't a chance she died in some accidental slip and fall that
couldn't possibly explain the three holes he found in her skull.
I don't understand why this is coming out now. I mean, this doctor has been here for a while.
Where was he when they were just like, oh yeah, let's just bury her and get on with this?
A million dollar question, right?
Now by the time he's getting this information
and like all the red flags are going up,
he's two weeks into his investigation
and he realizes that he still hasn't received
the death certificate from Maria Marta's family.
So he's thinking, okay, maybe if I can get that,
maybe that's gonna clear up this whole thing.
So he tells Horacio that he needs that pronto
and Horacio is like, listen, no problem, I'm
gonna get that death certificate from Carlos, which he does.
And then when that gets passed off to Diego, it's still like in the envelope and everything.
I mean, they just like literally hand this thing on.
Diego opens it, hoping to find just a routine piece of paperwork for him to file away showing
that Dr. Biasi was mistaken, that Maria Marta had just slipped and hit her head, like the family says,
which would be a tragedy for sure, but an accident all the same.
But what he sees instead is bogus. I mean, worse than bogus. It's straight up fraudulent.
Because this thing, which obviously we know it couldn't be completely accurate because they didn't even see her, but what they see is that it says she died
from natural causes. A heart attack.
And the wild part is, it doesn't even say that she died at their home, or even in
the city that their home is in, but it says that she died in the Capitol.
So, Guillermo and Michael didn't even give whoever they got this piece of paper from,
like the slip and fall story, tell them any details about where this happened, nothing?
Diego doesn't know, because he's wondering, like, did they tell the funeral home that
issued this something different?
Or did this place just get it wrong, a miscommunication, maybe outright negligence?
I mean, clearly this isn't an operation getting hung up on details.
Right.
And like I said, it was still in the envelope.
Horacio says that he didn't even look at it.
So maybe the family didn't even realize the discrepancy.
I mean, there could be some kind of explanation.
But either way, it doesn't sit well with Diego,
especially considering Dr. Biasi's claims.
And so now, Diego's on a mission to get to the bottom of this.
So he calls Horacio in for an interview.
And on top of everything else, we got Dr. Biasi's story, the bogus death certificate,
Horacio mentions something new, something that was found at the scene.
He calls it a quote unquote pituto, which the Netflix series translates to thingy in English.
Ashley, I'm gonna need something more than thingy.
More than thingy, yeah, I know. Well, he says that it's this small piece of metal,
maybe it's lead, and the best he can do is compare it to like a shelf
lug, like those little pieces of metal that stick out in a cabinet or whatever for a shelf to rest on.
Yeah.
OK, yeah, so by the way, this thingy wasn't just
at the scene, it was under Maria Marta's body.
OK, and where is this thingy, this pituto now?
Well, he says that John was the one who spotted it
on the floor after Maria Marta's body was moved to the bed.
And I guess John had asked Horacio what it was, and Horacio says that he was like,
I don't know man, go ask Carlos, we're in his house, so John goes and asks Carlos.
Carlos was also like, I don't know, how the heck should I know? What does it even matter at this point?
Because I mean, even after everything was like cleaned up the scene was still chaos There was all kinds of random medical supplies tossed haphazardly around
Syringes gauze vials whatever so they all I guess assumed that it was nothing and then he said that John just kind of scooped it
Up and then flushed it down the toilet
What yeah, are they flushing all the other stuff that's thrown around like that's not even a rational explanation of where to put this thing
Yeah, Diego would agree with you.
It's suspicious.
So when John comes in for his interview,
Diego obviously confronts him about the thingy,
and he even has John draw him a picture of it.
And it turns out that one man's shelf lug
looks a lot like another man's spent bullet.
What?
I know.
You're kidding me.
Mm-mm.
So Diego tells Horacio that this all stinks to high heaven, and he needs to have Maria
Marcha's body exhumed for an autopsy.
Which is what should have happened from day one.
Yeah, freaking finally, like shoulda, woulda, coulda.
But with Horacio's approval, Diego orders his team to exhume her body,
and then there is finally an autopsy that happens on December 2nd.
That very night, Diego gets a call from the medical examiner, Dr. Flores, who is on one,
because just like Dr. Biasi said, he has already found two holes in her skull.
He's not even done with the autopsy.
And by the way, Dr. Flores isn't even aware
of all the weird stuff Diego has been uncovering.
And by that, I mean, as far as I can tell,
like Diego didn't tell him about the potential bullet
or thingy or whatever,
or Dr. Biassi's story about the holes
in Maria Marta's head.
So initially when Dr. Flores calls,
he is like, this is weird,
but he suggests that
maybe the holes were made by like some kind of blows, maybe from a hammer.
But he's like, listen, I'm just calling you because this is wild, nothing definitive yet.
I'm still doing the thing.
I'll call you when I know more.
Well then not long after that call, Flores calls back, even more agitated than before.
And he's like, FYI, we are up to five holes now.
And then he calls back again a little bit later
and he's like, yeah, my man,
you are never gonna believe this,
but throw the hammer theory out the window.
When we opened her skull,
we found five bullets lodged in her head.
Oh my God.
Obviously any notion of Maria Marta's death
being anything but a homicide is set firmly
aside at this point.
And confirming that the cause of death was gunshot wounds makes the thingy pretty freaking
relevant to the investigation now, which has suddenly gone from a standard cause of death
inquest to a full-blown homicide investigation.
Yeah, super glad their best piece of evidence
was literally just flushed out of a toilet.
I mean, not ideal, but also not game over either,
because you see, it turns out that their neighborhood
isn't hooked up to any kind of municipal sewage system.
Instead, each house has an underground septic tank
where all their sewage is collected,
which means that investigators are about to go through
some sh- literally.
So they dig into the septic tanks, search through the contents for nine full hours,
and get down to the very last bucket of waste,
when suddenly, finally, their metal detector starts beeping.
They've got it. A 32 caliber long projectile.
But not that they have anything to match it to though.
Cause their searches in and around Maria Marta's house,
trusty metal detectors in hand,
don't turn up any signs of a weapon.
Yeah, no, I don't think anyone can flush a whole gun
down a toilet very easily.
And this is happening, what, a month or so later?
At least.
I mean, honestly, probably closer to two.
And this almost second month in, this is when Diego has his investigators
actually process the crime scene for evidence.
So yes, a lot of stuff could be gone, but there's also some stuff that they find.
Because when they spray luminol, the walls light up.
And what stands out most, according to Diego,
are the finger drag marks.
Like, it looks like Maria Marta had tried to grasp onto anything
in the struggle with her attacker or attackers.
The other important, albeit delayed, discovery that they
make is of three different unknown DNA profiles intermingled at the crime
scene.
Now the problem is I can't find any information on what it's from, like if it was, did they
pull it from blood or touch DNA or whatever?
But I know that testing reveals that the samples belong to two unidentified men and one unidentified
woman. The Argentinian news outlet La Prensa reports that one profile belonging to the person it calls Man 1
was found intermingled with Maria Marta's blood on the bathroom ceiling beams and door frame,
as well as somewhere, I think, sort of in the entryway of the bedroom.
And then Man 2's profile, meanwhile, was found intermingled with man one's profile
on a bathroom ceiling beam.
And then that female profile was found
on the bedroom carpet.
Who have they tested the profiles against?
Like, was there anyone at this point?
I think just Maria Marta at this point.
And then beyond that, all they know
is that there were three other people
besides her in the bathroom.
But they have suspicions of who the DNA might belong to, because at this point, the lawyer representing Maria Marta's family
tells Horacio that Diego firmly has his sights set on them.
Them being?
All of them, all of the family. Her husband husband Carlos, first and foremost, for both the murder
and, I mean, they're saying basically a cover-up.
But then in that cover-up, they're saying that her brothers, Horacio and John, could
have been involved or were involved, her sister Irene, her sister's husband Guillermo, even
Dr. Gourvay Gordone, and Beatriz, the masseuse.
And Horacio is outraged when he's told that they're all going to be brought in for questioning again,
this time as suspects.
But why?
Like, this isn't just a husband and a wife we're talking about here.
It's her husband, her family, a random emergency doctor, a masseuse.
Not just why, but how do you get all these people to agree to murder or at minimum a cover-up?
Well, Diego's still working on the details, to be honest.
All he knows is that whatever happened that Sunday evening in October,
the family has been doing its damnedest to cover it up.
There's the crime scene cleanup, the fraudulent death certificate,
the rushed burial, the fleshed thingy.
And now he's got a few witnesses who claim that the family demanded police be kept away
that night, gave orders to guards to not let them in the community at all, and maybe, possibly,
even paid someone off.
Now the family totally denies giving any orders to the guards or paying anyone off.
But Horacio acknowledges that he had asked some of his friends to hold police off if
they could.
Not because he was trying to hide anything, he says, or to cover for anyone else, just
because they all thought that Maria Marta's death had been an accident and he worried
that a police presence would make an already traumatic situation even more traumatic, especially for their parents.
And so no cops visit the scene that night.
But Diego isn't buying much of anything that the family says at this point.
He's even starting to suspect that Carlos' alibi is as bogus as the death certificate.
Because he's actually got a couple of staff members from the clubhouse who claim that
he couldn't have been at Irene and Guillermo's until close to seven because he'd actually been at
the clubhouse at that point. He was having coffee and limoncello. And Diego thinks that he did that
on purpose, that he went there to establish a more public, more verifiable alibi. And when he can run
some Carlos admits he did go to the clubhouse for coffee and a limoncello that day. I think that's something that he did often, but he says it wasn't in the evening
at all. It was after lunchtime. Okay, what am I missing here? Why would he go out of his way to
establish an alibi, which is what Diego is claiming, but then deny he'd been there?
Why indeed? Like it doesn't make much sense. Unless he isn't making up an alibi. Maybe the
witnesses got their time wrong. Or is there a world where he's covering for Irene and Guillermo?
Like, maybe he's trying to be their alibi and they're his, like...
Okay, so at this point, is the family, like, a full united front? Or is anyone, like,
pointing the fingers at Carlos?
No, they're a full united front.
They're behind him 100 percent and almost to their own detriment, right?
Because I mean, we know that Carlos is Diego's main target and in sticking by him,
they're almost making themselves look worse in Diego's mind.
But Diego is determined that he's got to get to the bottom of
this family wide cover cover-up.
Because in his mind, the cover-up
will expose the truth about the murder itself.
The family, meanwhile, swears there is no cover-up.
Just a series of decisions and coincidences
that maybe don't look great in retrospect,
like they'll give him that.
But they think this is more of a prosecutor who's just
hell-b bent on connecting dots
that just aren't even there.
Like for one, they say Carlos would never want
to hurt his wife.
I mean, they had a good marriage by all accounts.
Maria Marta was young when they got married,
but I mean, they were happy and prosperous.
Carlos had enjoyed major success in his career
as a stockbroker, which allowed him to retire
at like the ripe old age of 50.
And I know I haven't even really mentioned Maria Marta's career.
She was a respected sociologist who made regular TV appearances with her brother, Horacio.
And she spent her free time doing what she truly loved, which was philanthropy.
And her freedom to balance both was in large part due to Carlos' professional success.
I mean, they were a team, but they also respected each other's autonomy.
I mean, it seems like these two genuinely liked each other after 30 years of marriage.
But that's not really the picture that the public was getting from the media.
Because in the months and then the years following Maria Marta's death,
her case takes on a life of its own.
The public's morbid curiosity is unending, along with their willingness to believe just
about anything about the family.
And bubbling just below the surface, there's this tension, this resentment even, from the
Argentinian public at large towards Maria Marta's family.
From a socioeconomic standpoint, I standpoint, their lives are just completely
unrecognizable to most Argentinians.
And because of that, a lot of people are willing to believe the
very worst of them.
Of course they thought they could just throw around some money
and have public officials do their bidding.
That's what quote-unquote they do.
Everyone knows that justice isn't for the
rich people. Only those with fewer resources have to face that. And I mean, if we're honest,
I mean, there probably is some measure of truth to that sentiment. So when less reputable media
outlets print wild allegations about Carlos and Maria Marta, the public is kind of primed to accept them as fact.
The whole thing takes on, I mean, truly,
major soap opera vibes and what's a good soap
without a lurid plot twist,
and they try and spin some doozies.
I'm talking everything from Maria Marta was gay
to Maria Marta and Carlos didn't have kids
because they were actually brother and sister,
just banana stuff.
And I don't know how much stock Diego puts into these kinds of allegations.
Although according to reporting by Raul Coleman, he does investigate them, but there is no
substance there.
Not even any plain old vanilla love affairs.
By 2004, though, Diego's ready to go public with some allegations of his own.
He thinks that he finally has gotten to the bottom of the conspiracy of silence surrounding
Maria Marta's death.
Before I get into his theory, though, we have to touch briefly on the concept of the Corralito.
You see, Argentina had suffered through an economic crisis in the years leading up to
Maria Marta's death.
By the end of 2001, there was a real fear
that there could be a run on the banks,
that everyone would pull all their money out
at the same time, and that the nation's
whole banking system would collapse as a result.
So the government implemented a policy
that put a weekly limit on the bank withdrawals.
This came to be called the Corlito,
which Walter Bianchi explains in his reporting for
Reuters is a reference to banks stockpiling cash in little corrals.
Well, Diego has discovered that Maria Marta made not one, but two money transfers during
the Corralito, illicitly transferring more than the weekly allotment to a bank out of
New York.
Do we know how much?
I don't know.
I don't think they ever say, but the implication is that they were pretty substantial, whatever
that means.
Okay, is that it?
That's not really a motive for murder.
Well, it might be if that money maybe came from criminals.
If you were, say, laundering drug money for the Juarez cartel out of Mexico.
I'm sorry, what? Yeah, so Diego thinks that Carlos was more than just a good stockbroker.
He believes that Carlos was laundering money for the Juarez cartel. Now, he isn't sure if
Maria Marta was in on it knowingly or not. He thinks it was more Carlos's gig, but that
maybe he had gotten all of his siblings wrapped up in it too. And ultimately, he thinks that either
Maria Marta was complicit and decided that she wanted out, or she wasn't complicit but had
uncovered their secret. Translated court documents printed in LA Times say that she, quote,
documents printed in LA Times say that she, quote, formed part of or was very informed of the mafia activity
and of the movement of illicit funds, end quote.
And then that same article says the documents
alleged that she was, quote, killed so she would not
reveal it to authorities.
What's he basing this on, though?
Well, that LA Times article explains
that Diego came to this whole theory
when he received
an anonymous tip letter.
Now, what it says exactly, I don't know, but he gets this letter and then he found
a quote, cryptic notation in a file on Maria Marta's computer.
And basically he makes a few other connections.
Like, do you remember Michael Taylor?
Like, he's the family friend who went with Guillermo to get the death certificate.
So his wife is named Nora, but everyone calls her Peachy.
And Peachy's sister Laura had been suspected
of basically being like the point person
for the Juarez Cartel in Argentina.
Though, important to note, she wasn't prosecuted for it.
A judge had ruled that there wasn't sufficient evidence.
So I think that there's like this,
like six degrees of separation kind of thing.
And he's basically claiming that they made transfers to a bank that did business with the Juarez cartel.
But that's about it. Like all these little pieces all over that he thinks are pointing to something.
But that all seems like a stretch.
Like, it's definitely not provable in court, it doesn't seem like.
I mean, yes.
So it feels a little circumstantial.
It feels like there's, I don't know if it's like when there's smoke, there's fire kind
of situation.
But the thing is, these aren't theories coming from a tabloid magazine.
Like theories sound so much more official when officials say that. And so when Diego, a public official, puts this out there,
the public eats it up.
And whatever he does have,
it is apparently enough to charge Carlos
with both Maria Marta's murder
and with the coverup of her murder,
and that happens in 2004.
Along with Carlos, Diego charges basically everyone else.
Guillermo, Horacio, John, Dr. Gouvery, Gordon, Beatriz, the masseuse, even a neighbor named
Sergio Benio with the cover-up.
Really, only Irene is left unscathed.
And for some reason, the tailors.
But the indictment also references
two other unknown individuals who were supposedly with Carlos at the house
when he killed Maria Marta.
Is that because of those DNA profiles that were found?
Yeah, I think so.
So do any of those profiles match Carlos? Obviously the guy like lives there.
I get that the DNA was mixed up with the victim's blood.
But even so, we know that Carlos handled her body. Even if he is a match, it seems like
possible that his DNA could have gotten mixed up in her blood when he was trying to save her.
You're right. I don't know.
At the time, you're spiring a little bit for where we are because at the time when he's
arrested, when they're all kind of charged, we don't know if either of the male profiles
match Carlos or anyone else in the family for don't know if either of the male profiles match Carlos
or anyone else in the family for that matter.
And part of the reason for that is that the relationship
between the family and Diego has just completely broken down
by this point, as you can imagine.
Yeah.
As far as Diego's concerned,
they're all conspiring to cover up a terrible crime,
which itself was committed to cover up other terrible crimes.
And as far as the family is concerned,
Diego's a hammer in search of a nail,
so they actually refused to provide DNA samples for him for two years. And John, Irene, and Horacio
all talk about this in the Netflix series. John, for one, says that he would have been totally cool
providing a sample as long as the DNA from the crime scene was put into the investigative file.
According to Horacio, one judge actually advised them
not to provide samples until Diego turned the ones
from the crime scene over to the court.
And this was a bit confusing to me,
like both John and Horacio's explanation.
So, Brett, I actually asked you to look into the role
of a judge in a criminal investigation in Argentina,
because in the US, judges don't really have a role
in an investigation or overseeing the
investigative files. So can you explain what you found?
Yeah. So I got all this from the US Department of Justice's webpage on the Argentinian criminal
justice system. And that says, quote, the investigation of crimes is theoretically a
judicial function vested in an agency headed by magistrates called investigating judges."
And then it says that any trial is then presided over by a different judge or maybe a set of
judges.
Okay, so best I can tell, John and Aracio are basically saying the same thing, that
once the crime scene samples become part of the investigating judges file, they'll be
happy to cooperate.
But as long as they're just in Diego's control, like they're not going to play ball. And Irene is even blunter
about her reservation. She is sure that Diego would flat out fabricate the results if it
were left up to him. Basically just claim that their profiles are a match even if they
weren't.
So there's just absolutely zero trust at this point.
Not even a smidge. And what definitely doesn't help their cause
is the fact that other people do provide voluntary samples
like neighborhood guards, stuff like that,
and none of those are a match.
So Carlos is the first to go to trial in 2007,
around five years after Maria Marta's death.
And it's around this time that the family finally relents.
They provide the samples and it turns out Carlos,
Horacio, John, Guillermo and Irene are all ruled out
as potential donors of those unknown profiles.
Now ask Diego and he'll tell you that's small potatoes.
He can explain it.
No, he can't explain it right now,
but the results don't change his mind.
Now, Carlos' trial lasts months,
and the first few months are literally just some guy
reading the entire investigative file out loud.
Well, that sounds riveting.
I don't know how you keep anyone engaged,
because the first witness doesn't even testify
until two months in.
But at the trial, once testimony actually starts, a childhood friend of Maria Marta's testifies about a conversation she had with Peechee at the tailor's house after Maria Marta's burial.
This friend says that she asked Peechee what had really happened to Maria Marta because she had heard so many different versions of the story.
And according to her, Peechee responded that they, quote, did what Carlos told us to do.
And they, quote, paid for them to do what Carlos wanted.
Which just for clarification, the implication is an immediate burial and no autopsy.
Which does jive with Guillermo and Michael going to two different funeral homes on a
Sunday night trying to get a death certificate without any examination of her body.
Yeah, that's the part I can't quite get over.
I mean, that and the doctor is not saying anything about the holes in her head.
But anyways, P.G. denies that any such conversation took place, swears that she never saw Carlos
pay for or try to pay for anything.
And she's like to this person who's testifying, I don't even know you.
Why would I confess some sinister plot to you a perfect stranger?
And she even accuses Maria Marta's friend of lying in an effort to just get her 15 minutes
of fame.
So after this, Dr. Biasi also testifies.
He says that as soon as he detected the holes
in Maria Marta's skull, he told Dr. Gourfery-Gordon
that they needed to file a police report.
But then like no one did.
And in theory, Dr. Gourfery-Gordon
is a part of the whole plot.
I mean, he's charged as an accomplice
in the coverup after all.
So it makes sense that he wasn't dialing up the authorities.
But on that same note, neither was Dr. Biasi.
Which makes you wonder, like, how concerned or alarmed could he have really been?
Yeah, I don't know.
And he also testifies that Carlos was unusually calm at the scene.
And that at one point, he told Dr. Biasi not to worry because he had made quote-unquote
arrangements with the other doctor. What kind of arrangements he was supposedly referring to,
though, is anybody's guess. Now, on the flip side of all of this,
Carlo's defense team scores a big win with the medical examiners who performed Maria
Marta's autopsy, because while they did determine
that she had been shot, they also said it wasn't obvious just from looking at her body.
An Argentinian newspaper called Clarin reports that even once they were examining her body,
the only injuries that were immediately apparent were bruise-like ones.
Dr. Moreira, who performed the autopsy with Dr. Flores, says, quote, At first glance, only closed blunt injuries were visible.
That is, no open injuries were seen, no injuries caused by firearms were observed.
And then he goes on to say, quote,
The ordinary person, not a doctor, could not have calmly realized that these injuries were not the product of gunshots. And as far as a doctor not specialized in forensic practices, he could also not have
realized.
So, in other words, only a doctor with forensic training could have realized that Maria Marta
had been shot.
Because it was only after they shaved her head that they detected any of those puncture
wounds at all.
So, in other words, it's totally plausible that the entire family actually believed that Maria
Marta died in an accident.
That even Dr. Govrigo Don could have believed that.
And they had no intention of hiding how she died
because they didn't know.
And I think back to the scene too,
she was like doubled over in like a full bathtub.
It looks like an accident.
Right.
But Diego manages to find a nefarious explanation
for all this, too.
He ba- I laugh a little.
It's not funny.
It's just a little absurd.
So he basically claims that the family, like, super glued
her head wounds closed.
What?
Yeah, he says something called cyanogen
was detected on her skull, which he claims
is indicative of the presence of super glue. Carlos swears that if cyanogen was detected on her skull, which he claims is indicative
of the presence of superglue.
Carlos swears that if anything weird was detected, it would have been from the lice shampoo that
Maria Marcia used after her philanthropic trips.
Which sounds a heck of a lot more plausible than superglue.
Superglue-ing gunshot wounds.
I've had head wounds that have needed like staples.
Staples, yeah. You don't just like superglue that shut with no one noticing.
And honestly, like all this is out the window because the medical examiners quickly rule out the presence of superglue.
But it doesn't stop Diego from claiming that it's still there. And I mean, not even just like at the trial, he is still claiming the glue was there even in the Netflix series
which came out in 2020.
This dude is committed to the idea of a grand cover-up.
He sees everything through that lens.
And culpatory evidence proves their guilt.
Exculpatory evidence proves they're hiding their guilt.
And his thing this whole time has been that the cover-up will unravel the murder plot.
But what if there is no cover-up?
There is still a murder.
And actually, Carlos and the family are pretty sure they know who was behind the murder.
Someone that they say was right under police's noses the whole time.
And they point the finger right at him in court.
And I've got a little surprise for you crime junkies.
Part two of Maria Marta's story is gonna hit your feeds tomorrow.
That's right, on a Tuesday.
We didn't wanna keep you in suspense all week,
but if you can't even wait that long,
you can listen to it right now in the fan club,
which is linked right in the show notes.
But we will be back tomorrow with part two of Maria Marta's story.
-♪ MUSIC PLAYING You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast.
We'll see you tomorrow with part two. I'm going to be back. Crime Junkie is an AudioChuck production.
So what do you think Chuck?
Do you approve?