Manuel Luna, the current owner of the farm where the crimes occurred, goes to feed the handful of cows he raises inside after seven thirty in the afternoon. The 69-year-old rancher gets out of a 1987 Nissan Patrol - almost as old as the event that brings us to his property - and puts on a blue work coat that shows many hours of work.
We have been waiting for him on the path that gives access to his plot, in front of a gate that is barred and secured with a bolt and padlock. The entire perimeter - 2.2 kilometers, Luna specifies - is fenced with barbed wire and small stakes. The posts closest to the entrance, however, are much thicker, pieces of old wood that we will not pay attention to until the rancher points his finger at them and reveals their unsuspected origin.
"Worse than in the West," titled The Case in large red capital letters on its cover, where the images of the four fatal victims still lying in this meadow that today belongs to Luna were also reproduced. "They cut down four oak trees and 'the owner' shot them dead," the magnitude of what happened was noted in a pretitle. "A life for a tree", the human cost of the tragedy was measured on the inside pages.
The photographs of the bodies were taken on the opposite side of the entrance to the farm, which has 20 hectares - it was 18 then - and belongs to the parish of Gomesende, a village of 24 inhabitants attached to the municipality of Pol (Lugo). The terrain towards the scene of the crimes, where Manuel Luna takes us in the Nissan Patrol off-road, is a slope planted with forage to support the livestock.
Halfway there is the gray stone house from whose window the perpetrator of the deaths, Marcelino Ares Rielo by name, O Garabelo by nickname, saw that foggy morning the silhouettes of the four men who had entered the farm, and how their chainsaws caused the last of the four oaks that had been planted there, trees that he had to provide shade for the cows, to fall.
It was exactly 9:20 a.m. on Saturday, November 19, 1983, as recorded in the biography that Marcelino Ares wrote while he was serving time for the crimes in Lugo-Bonxe prison and which he titled with the nickname he inherited from his mother: O'Garabelo.
While we travel from Madrid to Galicia to gather data on the ground, the book takes the opposite route, coming from the Lugo bookstore Valín, specialized in out-of-print titles and the only one we found that still offers it; two copies remain.
"Of the first edition he sold 6,000 books quickly, flying, and had to take out another 6,000," the second wife of the quadruple murderer will tell us when we locate her in the small town in Madrid where she lives. The woman, who requests anonymity, met Marcelino Ares while on leave from prison and accompanied him, once released, until his death on February 5, 2005. O Garabelo was killed by leukemia at 70 years of age.
From reading the 420 pages that occupy his memoirs, one concludes, among other things, that he was a man of lurches. He was born on January 20, 1935 in O Chao do Pousadoiro, a dozen kilometers from the oaks of discord. Sixth of eight siblings, his parents weathered the post-war hardships by squeezing four rented cows. He acquired the deafness that his profiles attribute to him at the age of 12, when a device he found while shepherding exploded.
He did military service and emigrated to Madrid, where he jumped from one job to another: porter, bricklayer, taxi driver, charcoal burner, tour guide... At the end of the 60s he returned to his homeland to run a bar in Meira, an adventure that only lasted three years because the place burned down. With the compensation that the insurance gave him, he decided to try his luck again in Madrid and started an even more ambitious business.
Associated with two of his brothers, at the end of 1974 he opened Hostal Ares in Buitrago de Lozoya. Rated two stars, with a dining room for 100 people and permission to open 24 hours a day, it was very frequented by expert hunters like him. But the Ares brothers did not understand each other well and ended up selling the hostel and dividing it up.
Once the hospitality adventure was over, O Garabelo decided to return to his native Galicia to become a rancher. In March 1981 he closed the deal with the owner of the property that we visit today with Manuel Luna - five million pesetas, 30,000 euros at the current exchange rate, he agreed with Nicasia - and moved to live in the gray stone house with his first wife, a Galician countrywoman whom he had courted by letter from Madrid, and the two children he had had with her.
With the character contextualized, we now delve into the motive for the event: why did those men have so much interest in the four oak trees? Why did Marcelino Ares use the shotgun to avenge his felling? The reader should know that a land concentration had just taken place in the area.
Carried out by the National Institute of Agrarian Reform and Development (Iryda), its objective was to group together the tiny plots that then made up the Galician rural landscape and give rise to larger farms, vast meadows that fed the cows and promoted the livestock and dairy sector.
In the property that O Garabelo bought there were pieces that had previously belonged to other neighbors and not all the transfers had been closed with a friendly handshake. There were, for example, those four oak trees - that's what Galicia calls oak trees - that José Díaz Folgueira, 67, better known as Maxistro, claimed to be rooted in land that had previously been his. Marcelino Ares claims in the book that, in exchange for letting him keep the four oak trees, he gave him a good number of birch trees, all the ones he wanted to take.
Days before Marcelino claimed a life per tree, he already had a first scuffle with Maxistro, whom he found on his farm next to the oak trees, alone, with a chainsaw in one hand - "he had hit little more than the shell of one of them with the saw," he says in the book - and a rock in the other. "Leave the stone and throw yourself outside, you deserve nothing more than to break your bones for being a liar and a traitor," O Garabelo scared him.
On November 19, 1983, however, Maxistro returned with reinforcements. He was accompanied by his son, José Luis Díaz Vila, 28, his brother-in-law, José Manuel Vila Feijoo, 55, Cándido Llanes Llamas, 53, owner of the sawmill where he was going to sell the horses, and his son, Javier Llanes Doval, 24, the only survivor. Later it will be told how he managed to escape the fury of O Garabelo.
"They thought that there was no one on the farm, because that day they were all going to go to Madrid to swear in the flag of the O Garabelo fillo, but at night they agreed that the woman should go alone; he would stay, I don't know what work he had to do," says Manuel Luna, interspersing Galician words and pointing to the gray stone house. "Then, in the morning, the man he had on the farm to help him went to look for him at the house and told him: 'They are there with the chainsaw.' And from the window O Garabelo saw them."
If he handles all these details it is not because he has read them in the book, but because Marcelino himself told them to him. After entering prison - he was sentenced to 56 years in prison, 14 for each victim - the land for which he had killed was abandoned. For the next two decades it was weeds without anyone even daring to ask about it.
"Most people thought that the farm belonged to O Garabelo," explains Luna. "When I saw the property and the house, and I was interested, the first thing I did was go to the Property Registry to see how it was. It turns out that O Garabelo bought it in installments and did not get to deed it. For that reason, the property still belonged to the previous lady, Nicasia. And before buying it, I tried to talk to O Garabelo, because I did not want to get in here without knowing what he planned to do with the property. He killed four people for defending his property and I wanted to be there. "Calm down. You have to be cautious in life."
Although the farm no longer belonged to O Garabelo, Luna drove more than 600 kilometers to Buitrago de Lozoya (Madrid), where he was told that the murderer had moved after regaining his freedom. The information was wrong, he did not live there, but the bar he had started was not far away. "An Arab/Galician restaurant," says Luna. A strange gastronomic mix that will make sense when we know that his second wife is of Moroccan origin.
The meeting must have taken place shortly before O Garabelo's death, around 2004, because Luna remembers him as already quite ill. "I got there and introduced myself: 'Hello, I'm so-and-so. I came because they say that property is for sale and I wanted to know how you had that.' And do you know what he told me? 'You can't imagine how grateful I am for your visit.'
Luna returned to Lugo with O Garabelo's blessing, closed the deal with Nicasia - "20 years ago in September, he says" - and began to clean the farm.
-I removed the firewood, the sand and cleared brush to put everything in the meadow. And then I found the horses. "These are the horses," he says, turning and pointing to posts that mark the path that leads to the entrance door to the property.
-How? These are the horses? We asked with some astonishment.
-Yes, yes, these are them. They were lying there, down there, already cut up. "When we killed the countrymen, the horses were left there," he explains at the entrance to the farm, pointing to the other side of the plot, to the opposite corner on the right. I cut them and made some stakes: this one, this one, this one, that one... I wanted to keep them because I needed stakes to close the farm and I know how resistant this wood is, this lasts a thousand years.
-Didn't he give you any kind of bad luck?
-No no no, it didn't matter to me... I found them there and brought them upstairs. I know it was those trees but that doesn't matter to me.
O Garabelo also told Luna exactly how the events happened, but we prefer this part to be told by the murderer himself through his book. The sequence begins with Manolo [the person he had hired to help him with the work on the farm] going to wake him up. He tells him that Maxistro and other men are cutting the carballs. Or Garabelo gets up, looks out the window, sees them and decides to go confront them.
He carries with him a blank pistol - "a perfect imitation of the 8 millimeter model" - thinking that if things got ugly the fictitious weapon would scare them away. He arrives where they are, they exchange several reproaches and one hits him on the back with a hoe. O Garabelo pulls out the fake gun and pulls the trigger, but the gun misfires. He then sees himself, always according to his story, attacked from all sides. In the scuffle he manages to take the ax from one of them and flees towards the house.
In the book Marcelino collects several expressions that lead to the conclusion that it was a crime of pride: "Partly offended and feeling the moral damage, which would leave my personal image in tatters...", "not having to endure the humiliation of malicious comments..."
The fact is that he took the shotgun - this time the real one - and left the house again "thinking how and what to say to them to make them leave."
"I stopped and with the gun at half height I said:
-Now what?
Nobody answered anything. To the one who had hit me with the hoe, who was the one in the center of the crescent, in front of me, I said:
-You are a son of a bitch.
At which point Maxistro, who was on the right, said:
-Come on.
An indecipherable mixture of pathological symptoms, obfuscation and lack of control invaded me and, without further words or waiting, in a space of seconds, I shot at anyone who moved or not. It took me a few seconds to recover from the previous situation and recognize the seriousness of the moment. "My God! But there was no choice."
Next to the felled horses, Maxistro, Maxistro's son, Maxistro's brother-in-law, and Cándido, the owner of the sawmill, were left dead. O Garabelo shot one of them twice and the gun loaded five cartridges, which led to the belief that Javier Llanes, Cándido's son, had been saved because there was no ammunition for him. The young man was outside the domain of O Garabelo, on the road that borders the farm, at the wheel of the cart [a small truck] in which they planned to take the trees.
In her meeting with O Garabelo, Luna felt confident enough to ask him about it.
-Then why did you leave him alive? Did you finish the shots or what?
-No no. I left him because he was off the farm. He knelt down and told me: 'I have two small children.' 'Come on, go and see how you declare.'
The survivor is now 66 years old and lives in a small two-story house in Meira. He's not there when we ring his doorbell mid-morning. The sawmill, which he took over after his father's death, is closed and has a "for rent" sign hanging on it. Javier, they tell us in a warehouse near his, has already retired. "I don't want to know anything about that topic," he told us from the balcony of his house when we finally located him late in the afternoon.
