This Monday, March 14, a popular jury will begin to try Marcelo Macarrón, accused of being the intellectual author of the femicide of his wife Nora Dalmasso, murdered in November 2006 in their house in the Villa Golf neighborhood of the city of Río Cuarto, Córdoba.The trial will be in charge of the technical judges of the Criminal and Correctional Chamber of 1st Nomination, from Río Cuarto, Daniel Antonio Vaudagna, Natacha Irina García and Gustavo José Echenique Esteve; and the prosecutor will be Julio Marcelo Rivero.
Nora Dalmasso
The debate will take place between 10 and 15 in the Courts of Rio Cuarto and 8 popular juries will participate. In turn, more than 300 people, including relatives, friends of the victim and the accused, neighbors, police and experts were summoned to testify in the framework of the process. The accused will be assisted by lawyers Marcelo Brito, Cristian Ayán and Mariángeles Mussolini while Dalmasso’s sons desisted from participating as plaintiffs in the case. Macarrón, 62, is the only defendant in the case for the crime of “homicide qualified by the link, malice and price or promise of remuneration” as an “instigator”, which provides for the penalty of life imprisonment. The cover was made official in September 2019 by prosecutor Luis Pizarro, the fifth and last of those who investigated the case. For Pizarro, the motive for “Norita’s” crime was motivated by “marital disagreements and economic issues.” Facundo Macarrón, son of the victim and the accused – also accused in the case and finally dismissed – published in December 2021 a public letter in which he supported his father and questioned the judicial officials who intervened in the investigation considering that in 15 years they reached an “investigative failure” as a result of the “terrible actions and omissions” they committed.
Nora Dalmasso with Marcelo Macarrón and his children Valentina and Facundo
“During these 15 years, much was said, much was written, much was pointed at our family. Our pain is today much greater because of the impotence of knowing that none of the prosecutors involved in the investigation sought with seriousness or professionalism the murderer of mom. None of them took care of giving us an answer as a family, and less as a society,” said the 32-year-old who was accused in the case when he was 19.Since the beginning of the investigation the widower claims to be innocent and said that at the time of the crime he was in the Uruguayan city of Punta del Este where he participated in a golf tournament with some friends. Norita was murdered at the age of 51 in the early hours of November 26, 2006 in her house in the exclusive Villa Golf neighborhood of Río Cuarto, in the south of the province of Córdoba. There he lived with the traumatologist Macarrón, with whom he had two children, Facundo, who was then studying law in the capital and Valentina, who by that time was traveling in the United States.
The Dalmasso family today
The experts determined that Nora died of asphyxiation by strangulation and her half-naked body was left lying on her daughter’s bed. For this reason, during the investigation five different hypotheses were followed, such as that it was a crime during a sexual game, a sexual abuse followed by death, a femicide and even murder for hire. The latter was the one that the prosecutors stayed with. Macarrón was prosecuted in March 2016 by former prosecutor Daniel Miralles, who initially questioned the alibi that he was at a golf tournament in Punta del Este when the murder occurred and charged him with “homicide qualified by the link” only. When prosecutor Pizarro took over the case in 2019, he modified the hypothesis and considered that the widower hired a hitman to kill his wife while he was away on his trip through Uruguay. They believe that the motive for the crime was economic disagreements between the couple.
