Murders of Ruth and José Bretón

On October 8, 2011, José Bretón Gómez killed his two young children — six-year-old Ruth Bretón Ortiz and two-year-old José Bretón Ortiz — at Las Quemadillas, a rural estate belonging to his parents outside Córdoba, Spain, then burned their bodies to prevent identification. He initially told police and relatives that he had lost the children at a local park while they were in his care for the weekend.

According to the Audiencia Provincial de Córdoba's account of the case, Bretón began planning the killings after his wife told him in September 2011 that she intended to divorce him. In the weeks that followed, he obtained prescription anxiolytic and antidepressant medication that had previously been prescribed to him, gathered roughly 250 kilograms of firewood, and purchased more than 270 liters of diesel fuel from a petrol station in Huelva. He also rehearsed a cover story — that he had briefly lost track of the children — by leaving his young nephews unsupervised for a few minutes while taking them to school on October 6, 2011.

On October 8, after spending the morning with relatives, Bretón drove Ruth and José to Las Quemadillas, arriving at around 1:48 p.m. During the drive or shortly after arriving, he gave the children an undetermined amount of the medication. He then built a pyre from firewood, diesel fuel and a metal table in a part of the estate hidden from outside view and laid the children on it — investigators were later unable to determine whether they were alive at that point — before igniting it and tending the fire until about 5:30 p.m., reaching temperatures cited at up to 1,200°C and destroying nearly all of the children's remains. Afterward, he drove near a local park, contacted relatives to stage the appearance of a search, and called Spain's emergency line at 6:41 p.m. to report the children missing, later filing a police report that evening.

The case drew significant scrutiny after Josefina Lamas, a forensic anthropologist with Spain's Scientific Police, examined the burnt bone fragments recovered from the estate and concluded they were non-human, describing them as rodent remains. At the request of the children's mother, a second forensic analysis found human bone fragments consistent with two- and six-year-old children, and a third analysis confirmed the finding; Lamas was subsequently removed from the case. During the later investigation into the evidence's chain of custody, Lamas testified that one numbered sample was missing from photographs of the evidence; the UDEV chief commissioner at the time, Serafín Castro, told the court the sample could have disintegrated.

Bretón's trial opened on June 17, 2013, before a public jury at the Audiencia Provincial de Córdoba. He denied killing the children or giving them medication. A cousin of the children's mother testified that Bretón had told him, on three separate occasions, that he had killed the children. On July 12, 2013, the jury unanimously found Bretón guilty, and on July 22, 2013, the court sentenced him to 40 years in prison on two counts of murder and one count of simulating a kidnapping. The High Court of Justice of Andalucía rejected his appeal in November 2013, and the Supreme Court of Spain unanimously rejected a further appeal in July 2014. In March 2015, the Audiencia Provincial de Córdoba reduced the sentence to a maximum of 25 years.