Breaking the Silence: The Maria Soledad Case

That's Soledad there.

Mirian,

María Eugenia,

Mónica, Cañizares,

Silvia, Nancy, Marcela.

I'm in fifth A!

Fifth A, I'm in fifth A

We were planning our senior trip to Carlos Paz.

But, obviously, not everybody could afford to go.

So we came up with this idea to hold fundraising dances

so we could raise money to pay for the girls

who couldn't afford to go.

I was one of those girls.

Spring Fling, crowning the Spring Fling queen.

We had the party on Friday, September 7,

at a club downtown.

LE FEU ROUGE CLUB

We didn't live in the city, so to get back home,

we needed to find someone to come and pick us up.

Sole said, "Where am I going to sleep? I have no way of getting back home."

I said, "Sole, you can stay at my house. It's not a problem. You can stay with me."

It was called "The Night of Surprises."

SPRING FLING QUEEN

It's ironic, but I don't even know why we called it that.

That evening, we were all really excited to get to the club.

We each had something to do and somewhere we had to be.

And Sole was in charge of the tickets.

There were lots of people.

Everybody was there.

Anything that could go wrong did go wrong that night.

The bouquets of flowers that were meant for the queen were missing.

It was a weird night.

I don't know. Something just felt off.

I told Sole, "Let's go home."

She said, "No, hold on. Give me a minute, Ro."

So I said, "Okay, fine."

After about 40 minutes, I was like, "Come on. Let's go, Sole."

And she told me she wasn't coming home with me.

I asked her why.

And she said, "I'm getting a ride from someone else."

I asked her, "Who?"

And she said,

"You know who."

That's when I knew...

it was him.

The girls called me around 3:00 a.m.,

saying, "Marilyn, get over here now. The power went out. It's total chaos."

So I left in a hurry, and that was the last time I saw her.

By the time I got back, she was gone.

I should have put my foot down.

I should have stood my ground and said, "No."

"You're coming home with me. I already told my parents."

I should have stood my ground.

At two or three in the morning, María Soledad left the party.

Did Tula pick her up?

Did she go to the bus stop?

Nobody knows what happened to María Soledad after that point.

THE MARÍA SOLEDAD CASE

How do I stop time and come back to life?

Marilyn used to play the guitar, and we'd all sing and dance.

But when Marilyn sang sentimental songs, Soledad would start crying.

I asked her once, "What's wrong?"

CLASSMATE

She told me she was in love with a man she couldn't be with.

She used to kind of hide it.

CLASSMATE

Like she was embarrassed to say she was in love.

But I noticed.

DON'T SAY YOU'LL LEAVE ME

Soledad was a writer.

We all knew she liked to write poems and things like that.

You could tell from the way she wrote about him that he was her first love.

The age gap was hard on her.

He was 28.

She never introduced him to us.

She never said, "Girls, this is my boyfriend." Never.

I saw him once.

CLASSMATE

One day, I was leaving school with Sole, and he was just passing by.

She said, there goes "el Flaco." She called him "el Flaco."

We were waiting at the bus stop,

and Sole said,

"Come on, Mirian. My friend's gonna give us a ride."

I asked, "But who is he?" And she said, "It's Luis."

I said, "No, count me out."

"I'm not allowed to get in cars with people I don't know."

"You can go, but I'm not coming."

And she said, "Oh, Mirian. I hate you. I wanted to go."

So, I didn't get in.

She ended up staying with me. She didn't get in, and the car left.

Supposedly, the driver was the guy she liked, Luis Tula.

I didn't know who he was, so I'd tell her,

"All that matters is that you're in love. That's a beautiful thing."

I had no idea who she was talking about.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1990

That Monday, I got to school,

and one of the girls asked me, frightened, "Mónica, have you heard from Sole?"

She told me, "She never made it home." I was like, "What?"

On that Monday, I had a class in a room facing the schoolyard.

I saw a man standing by the flagpole.

He shouted to me, "Sister, my daughter never came home!"

I asked, "Who are you, sir?"

He said, "I'm Mr. Morales, María Soledad's father."

I asked, "Where is she?"

He said, "She never came home from the dance."

He told me they'd spent the weekend looking for her.

And, without asking him anything else, I brought him into the classroom.

MARÍA SOLEDAD'S FATHER

I remember seeing him there.

He said, "Girls, I just want to know where my daughter is."

"Did she spent the night somewhere else? Is she at someone's house?"

We said, "We don't know where she is. If we knew, we'd tell you."

"We have no idea."

We didn't have any information that could help Mr. Morales, so he left.

Nobody came to give us class that day.

We were nervous because we were wondering, "Where are all the teachers?"

They left us alone in the classroom, but we were told to stay put.

Our classroom faced the main entrance, which was next to the principal's office.

One of us climbed the window to see if she could hear anything.

And then, suddenly...

At around 11:00, Elías Morales came back in,

and he cried out, "They found my daughter!"

Patricia was listening in.

And she screamed, "She's dead!" Those exact words.

That's when the chaos began.

Teachers and assistants came running from all over,

trying to keep the girls inside.

Windows were broken. Some got hurt.

I felt so angry and powerless that I punched a door.

I still have the scar to this day.

They had to give me sedatives because I was having a breakdown.

It was horrible.

We were all distraught.

It was so sad.

We all had...

so much fun together that Saturday.

And then we received such terrible news the following Monday.

I don't know how my classmates and I made it

from the school to the bus stop.

Or how I got on the bus.

I just know as soon as I got home,

I told my family it was my classmate Sole who had died.

She had been killed.

I'm sorry.

We were only 17 years old.

We had lived a sheltered life.

The innocent times of our senior trip and our graduation dinner.

Before that point, we had no idea that evil existed.

Early Monday morning,

a bus driver traveling from Valle Viejo to the Capital Department

passed the bend at Villa Parque Chacabuco

and saw people standing next to a car.

He thought they had had an accident. He got out and noticed something odd.

He noticed that the people were behaving strangely.

They seemed suspicious.

A few hours later, in that exact same place, two workers

came across María Soledad's body.

This is the road to Villa Chacabuco.

It's the place where her body was found,

ditches very close to her parents' house.

The girl was found partially buried...

FEDERAL ARGENTINEAN POLICE

...very close to the city.

María Soledad Morales's body was found disfigured.

Had you ever encountered a body with so many injuries before?

SUPERINTENDENT

No, never.

The police are hard at work.

There is no news yet.

Judicial sources have said that the officers

that carried out the initial work where the body was found were negligent.

I passed by at 8:30, and there were cops everywhere.

NEIGHBOR

I walked right up to the girl.

Anybody could have done the same. People were everywhere.

Nobody cordoned off the area to keep people away from her.

The police were just walking around.

Even with the body faced down

and the majority not knowing the victim was female,

some police officers already knew it was María Soledad Morales.

The lack of preservation at the scene,

and the number of inconsistencies,

show that the goal was to prevent the crime from being solved, right?

The police issued a warrant for the detention of Luis Tula,

who was identified as the main suspect

due to his alleged romantic relationship with María Soledad Morales.

The judge handling the case will hear Luis Tula's testimony.

He's been detained as the sole suspect

in the death of the young student from Catamarca.

POLICE STATION FOUR - REGIONAL UNIT CATAMARCA POLICE

This afternoon, after a brief interrogation,

Tula was released due to lack of evidence against him.

It seems as though this crime won't be solved anytime soon.

The following day, at the burial,

we agreed that we'd all wear our uniforms.

To honor her, because she loved her uniform.

May the Lord open the gates of paradise

to his daughter María Soledad,

so she can return to that land where there is no more death.

We said our goodbyes to her the day she would have turned 18.