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For several months, Patricia Ramírez, the mother of murdered child Gabriel Cruz, had been reporting to Spain's ministry of interior and the prison authorities that Ana Julia Quezada, the confessed killer of her young son, was enjoying privileges at the Brieva women’s prison (Ávila), allegedly with the collusion of a prison officer. Among those perks, she claimed, was access to a mobile phone, which she used to maintain secret contact with a well-known production company in order to sell the story of the boy’s murder for a hefty sum.
However, the clue that led to the discovery of the sexual and favour-based scheme Quezada had orchestrated in the Ávila prison is far more bizarre, according to reports submitted by the Guardia Civil to the investigating court in Ávila. The court has charged a 60-year-old male prison officer for allegedly providing her with the mobile phone, which he himself took care to hide, in exchange for sexual favours. As first reported by El Periódico and confirmed by various sources involved in the case, the thread started to unravel - somewhat accidentally - following confessions made during late-night phone calls from autumn 2023 onwards by the inmate's girlfriend, a young woman from Catalonia, to a tarot show on a local television channel.
This 30-year-old woman, a resident of Barcelona – and who, according to sources from the Civil Guard, is believed to have been manipulated by Quezada – told the tarot reader live on air about her doubts regarding the relationship with the inmate, whom she identified by her two first names. At the same time, she revealed that the Dominican woman had a mobile phone in prison, and that she communicated with her regularly via messaging. She also claimed that she boasted she was going to earn up to 300,000 euros for the documentary series she was working on.
This woman worked in an old people's home and began to have a romantic relationship with the 'Pescaito' murderer in 2022 after the young Catalan woman began to write to her in prison at the end of 2020. However, the interest of the girl from Barcelona in the criminal began earlier. As SUR has been able to learn, the girl moved from Barcelona to Almeria in September 2019 to follow in the provincial court all the sessions of the trial of Quezada.
Both of them - this woman confessed to investigators - became "girlfriends" only years later and after the initial reluctance of Quezada, who was initially in a long-distance relationship with a man. From that moment on, the Catalan girl began to travel practically every month from Barcelona to Ávila to meet her partner.
The Guardia Civil believes - based on the interrogation of this woman, the tarot reader herself, and several inmates - that the killer began the relationship with the Catalan girl purely out of self-interest. The killer was convinced,after befriending an ETA inmate, that only in prisons in Catalonia or the Basque Country would she have a better chance of gaining her freedom one day. That’s why, according to sources close to the case,since the beginning of 2024, she had been pressuring the young Catalan woman to start sorting the paperwork to get married, in order to present a strong case to the prison authorities for a transfer to Barcelona, her girlfriend’s place of residence.
Quezada, in her obsession with securing that transfer, which, in her imagination, was supposedly going to bring her closer to release, is believed to have recorded her sexual relations with the prison officer under investigation as a way to, when the time came, blackmail the management of the Brieva facility if they continued to refuse to transfer her to Barcelona. The inmate had also threatened the Catalan woman with exposing sexually explicit photos that she had sent her, if she did not comply with her wishes, if she did not speed up the wedding arrangements, or if she did not send her money regularly.
The murderer's girlfriend who, in her statement, implicated a second prison officer (who has not been charged) in the sexual favours involving Quezada, admitted to officers that during one of her first visits in 2023 for a conjugal meeting, she agreed to her partner’s request to buy a mobile phone and hand it over to the prison officer.
This officer was the one who smuggled the phone in and out of the prison, never leaving it inside the facility to avoid its discovery. In fact, the device has still not been found. However, investigators believe that until at least spring 2024, the murderer used that phone to communicate with the production company planning to make a series about the murder of Gabriel Cruz in February 2018 in Almeria.
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