Crime of Cuenca

In August 1910, José María Grimaldos López, a 28-year-old shepherd from Tresjuncos in Spain's Cuenca province who was known locally as "El Cepa," disappeared after selling a number of sheep he owned. He worked on the farm of Francisco Antonio Ruiz, where he was frequently mocked by farm manager León Sánchez and security guard Gregorio Valero. Unknown to the village at the time, Grimaldos had traveled to La Celadilla, a shallow lagoon about four kilometres away in the municipality of El Pedernoso where bathers covered themselves in mud believed to have curative properties. When weeks passed without word from him, rumors spread that he had been murdered for the money from the sheep sale. His family filed a complaint with the court of Belmonte accusing Sánchez and Valero, and the two men were arrested and tried. In September 1911 the court dismissed the case for lack of evidence and released them.

In 1913, at the family's insistence, a new judge, Emilio Isasa Echenique, reopened the case, and Sánchez and Valero were arrested again. The Civil Guard tortured and mistreated the two men to extract confessions and to learn what had allegedly become of Grimaldos's body. On November 11, 1913, a judge in Osa de la Vega, acting on the Belmonte court's order, certified that Grimaldos had died on August 21, 1910, murdered by Valero and Sánchez — the record itself noted in the margin that "the body could not be identified because it has not been found."

After more than four years in pretrial detention, the two men went to trial in 1918 on a case file described as contradictory and unclear. A twelve-member jury deliberated for thirty minutes before finding them responsible for Grimaldos's death, and the Provincial Court sentenced each to 18 years in prison, sparing them the era's death penalty by garrote. Valero was imprisoned at San Miguel de los Reyes in Valencia and Sánchez at the prison in Cartagena. On July 4, 1925, both men were released under two pardon decrees after serving 12 years and two months.

The case collapsed in February 1926, when the parish priest of Tresjuncos received a request from a priest in the town of Mira, about 113 kilometres away, for Grimaldos's baptism certificate ahead of his upcoming marriage. Grimaldos, alive and unaware of the scandal his disappearance had caused, traveled back to Tresjuncos, where the judge of Belmonte ordered his arrest and the press reported the story nationally. Spain's Minister of Grace and Justice ordered the Supreme Court prosecutor to seek revision of the conviction; the resulting order found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Valero and Sánchez's confessions, the central evidence against them, had been extracted "under exceptional continuous violence." The Supreme Court subsequently voided the 1918 ruling, formally established the two men's innocence, and nullified Grimaldos's death certificate.

The state was ordered to compensate Sánchez and Valero, and in 1935 each was granted a lifetime pension of 3,000 Spanish pesetas per year along with five years of retroactive payments. A separate trial was held to determine responsibility for the miscarriage of justice, and the two men relocated to Madrid, where they were given jobs as security guards for the city hall. The case became one of Spain's best-known examples of a coerced confession and wrongful conviction, and has since been retold in a 1939 novel and a 1979 feature film, among other works.