The actor Jorge Ferrandis bought the land in Pontons when his girlfriend was already dead

It was the first thing that the only residents of the place asked him, a couple whose residence predates the regulations that prohibit building there. Ferrandis responded to the couple that they were just looking for a place to spread out a hammock and rest away from the noise of the city. After that first contact, the relationship between the stranger and his new neighbors became frequent, since his plot was next to their house. Despite the fact that Ferrandis often spoke of an ex-wife with whom he continued to have a relationship, he always came alone. One day in September 2021, the man saw Ferrandis opening a hole in his land. Puzzled, he asked why he was digging. Ferrandis said that he wanted make a latrine.

He could urinate in any corner of a plot that merged with the forest, but he insisted that he wanted to make a cesspool because in the future he might come with a caravan. The neighbor stopped asking questions and offered to keep the tools at home because if he left them out in the open they would end up being stolen. Ferrandis accepted. One afternoon, the neighbor leaned out to see the hole and had an unhealthy feeling looking at it closely. Upon returning home, he told his wife that it seemed more like a latrine “a grave”: a sinister rectangle dug with a pick and shovel, one meter wide by two meters long and almost two meters deep.

Tomb

Ferrandis’s visits to Pontons, always behind the wheel of a different rental car because he did not have his own vehicle, they became frequent in October, so much so that the couple once told him that the next day they would leave for Barcelona and that if he planned to go he should keep the tools. Ferrandis kept the tools and returned the next day. When they returned from the city, the actor had covered the hole. He said that he had changed his mind, that he was no longer going to make any latrines. The couple thought for the first time that they might have buried something in the hole.

His movements in the days that followed sowed more concern. He marked out the perimeter where the hole had been with stones, planted lavender on top, and surrounded it with a wooden garden fence. Later, Ferrandis did not return to the field.

When it was one year since the actor’s last visit, the couple, owner of a suspicion that they had not been able to banish, informed the City Council. Jorge Diaz, deputy mayor, followed the couple to the Ferrandis land. “That was not normal, it looked like a tomb, facing the sunset,” he explains. The indications that he could have hidden something – or someone – underground multiplied before Díaz’s eyes, who suspected that the lavender could have been planted to distract the wild boars and the fence, put up to prevent other animals from digging. He did not make sense that without having a private car he would have been interested in a piece of land that is an hour from Barcelona and with no possibility of getting there by public transport. He did not agree with the latrine or the caravan, because there was no path drawn up to the land that would allow a heavy vehicle to be moved there. The Pontons Town Hall contacted the Mossos.

But the Catalan police, busy with other issues, did not respond to the request and did not go to Pontons. A few weeks later, Díaz called a corporal from the seprona, the environment unit of the Civil Guard, told him about the situation and let him know that perhaps Ferrandis had buried an animal in that place, something that is also prohibited. The corporal went to Pontons and, next to the lavender fence, listening carefully to Díaz’s explanations, he feared the worst. The agent informed the Command of Barcelona and this activated the investigators of the unit of crimes against people.

no trace of ruth

The Civil Guard reviewed the ownership papers for that land and saw that it had been acquired by Ferrandis but that it was also in the name of a woman, Ruthwhich had 42 years old and a resident of Barcelona. They investigated both of them and realized that there were no verifiable signs of the woman’s life since 2021. she Neither she had used her credit card, nor had she gone to the doctor, nor had anyone seen her in that time. Nothing. However, there was no report of Ruth’s disappearance.

The police contacted the woman’s family, who clarified that they had no relationship with her because the emotional relationship was broken. The Civil Guard sensed that Ruth could have been murdered and, looking back at Pontons, also that Ferrandis could have buried her on the plot of La Ponderosa, which he would have bought for that purpose. At the beginning of 2023, a court in Vilafranca del Penedès granted a court order to dig.

the unearthing

Early in the morning of January 3a legal secretary, a forensic doctor from the Institut de Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Catalonia (IMLCFC), Deputy Mayor Díaz and the Civil Guard investigators carefully observed each spoonful of earth that was removed by a backhoe hired by the City Council. Upon reaching the depth of 165 centimeters under the lavender, a strong stench of corpse escaped through the earth and filled the nostrils of those present. Then the first of the sixteen plastic bags they ended up digging up that morning turned up. Opening it, they found a human skull.

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The investigator in charge of the case called the agents who, without his realizing it, were closely following Ferrandis’s movements in Barcelona. “You can stop him now,” he ordered.

The confession

Ferrandis declared in court that he did not kill Ruth, that he only helped her die. He also said that he had kept his dismembered body in those plastic bags for a year, before burying them on that land in Pontons, in October 2021. The Civil Guard registered two addresses in which the retired actor lived alternately: some ground floor in Travessera de Gràcia and some ground floors on Calle Castillejos. In the first they found Ruth’s clothes and a pick and shovel with which he had dug her grave. In the second, where he said that he had committed the crime and according to his statement kept the plastic bags, everything was clean. The investigation, pending genetic tests to confirm that the corpse belongs to Ruth, is now focused on reconstructing what Ferrandis has done in recent years.