Year 2002. The manager Walter Mantovani and the waiter Miguel Ángel Monzón, attended a confectionery of an Esso service station, located at the junction of the Pilar branch of the Pan-American Highway and Route 25. There “between 6 and 7 in the morning” on Monday, October 28, they see a man arrive who entered, asked for “a tear in a jar” and some croissants, and after a few minutes he approached the bar and asked: “Che, do you know anything about the woman they killed in the country?” The man in question was Nicolás Pachelo, who is currently facing the third trial for the crime of the sociologist María Marta García Belsunce, through which the prosecution accuses him as the main responsible.
“We didn’t know about it so we dismissed it. I don’t know how many days passed until it was known that it was not an accident but a murder. There we remember with Miguel the phrase and we wondered, if it was an accident, why did he talk about murder?” Mantovani recalled that after that, when the case began to take media coverage, Pachelo returned to the confectionery, learning that “a waiter” had declared and in a state that he described as “in a violent way, taken out, blinded, desperate.”
“Do you know anything about the woman they killed in the country?”: Pachelo’s question about the death of María Marta when talking about “accident”
“When I saw him arrive I was paralyzed. It was known that a waiter had declared, but my name had not transcended. He approached the bar and asked me about Miguel Monzón. There I managed to relax, luckily I was not in the place. There were TV cameras on the spot and I suggested he not expose himself and please leave,” he said. This was disseminated by the Telam agency, while specifying a moment in which the prosecutor Andrés Quintana asked the manager how he was at that same moment that he gave his testimony. “I am nervous, my previous statement was when they accused (Carlos) Carrascosa and I think my statement did not affect or modify, but in this case it did. Having Nicolás Pachelo to my right, I think my truth can change something,” he said. In another finding of the investigation, the analysis of the calls made by Pachelo with his cell phone was found, by the inspector commissioner Christian Blanco, a communications specialist. “He picked up a message at 7:57 a.m., practically at 8 a.m.,” he said. A fact that is key for the prosecution, considering that the former neighbor and accused of the crime had dismissed Monzón’s testimony, saying that it was “totally false” because that day he had gotten up “between 9 and 9.30, never before.” Blanco added that although he cannot specify that Pachelo was “at the gas station because at that time the cell phone was not used,” but that “he was at least until 1:30 p.m. in the Carmel area” and “had calls entrances and exits.”
The prosecution composed of Patricio Ferrari, Andrés Quintana and Federico González, follows the hypothesis that María Marta found Pachelo robbing her home. Given this, he accuses him as the author of the crime, along with the former guards of the private neighborhood, José Ortiz and Norberto Glennondos, indicated as co-authors. María Marta García Belsunce was found dead by her husband, Carlos Carrascosa (accused by the prosecutor of the case, Diego Molina Pico, convicted and acquitted of the crime) on October 27, 2002 in their home located within the Carmel country in Pilar.
