PROPERTY tycoon Juan Carlos Quer has thanked his daughter posthumously on Twitter for her 'legacy' after her rapist and killer, José Enrique Abuín Gey, was sentenced today to permanent reviewable prison.
Juan Carlos, his ex-wife Diana López-Pinel, and Diana's younger sister Valeria, now 19, have been campaigning tirelessly to prevent left-wing parties in government from scrapping 'permanent reviewable prison' sentences, which they had voiced their intentions of doing on the grounds that these only served as 'revenge'.
It is not the same as a literal life sentence – which Juan Carlos has long said he did not agree with – although it can be if needed: violent killers, especially multiple offenders, or where children are involved or there has been sexual assault or kidnap, are kept behind bars unless and until they are fully rehabilitated.
If it is considered after exhaustive examination that a prisoner of this nature is, indeed, rehabilitated and can safely return to life in the community, he or she – in all of Spain's 13 cases bar one, 'he' – will be released, although measures may be taken at first as a precaution, such as electronic tagging.
Juan Carlos said during his campaign that if Enrique Abuin were to be fully rehabilitated, he as the father of a murder victim 'would be the first to agree' that he should be released, but that unless and until he ever was, he should be kept away from potential victims.
This procedure being maintained is 'Diana's legacy' and she will now be 'smiling down from heaven' to know that she had probably saved the lives of other women in the future, her father says.
'El Chicle', as Abuín is colloquially known – 'The Chewing Gum', because of his crooked teeth when he was at school – is not known to have murdered anyone else, but his ex-wife's twin sister Vanessa was reportedly raped when she was just 17, in 2005, and her sister convinced her not to report the matter.
And Abuín's being arrested over Diana Quer's disappearance, leading to the discovery of her body after more than 500 days' missing, came as a result of his attempting to force a 32-year-old Ecuadorian woman into the boot of his car and to take her phone off her so she could not call for help – exactly what happened to Diana herself.
On this occasion – Christmas Day 2017 – two men walking by heard the victim's cries for help and confronted Abuín, who fled.
Police had had him under the spotlight for many months, but did not want to arrest him until they could 'pin something on him', since otherwise, they may have been forced to release him again.
During the long trial by jury which concluded with today's verdict, witnesses came forward – including young women who had never known Diana.
Two of these young women say Abuín followed them and tried to get them into his car, hassled them in a bar, and only stopped when the husband of one them appeared.
A long-term friend of Abuín's says the accused used to hang around school gates trying to 'pull' older teenage girls, and would hassle females online in a 'very persistent, annoying way', 'refusing to take 'no' for an answer'.
The witness said Diana was Abuín's 'type' – long, dark hair, tanned, tall and very slim.
Now, the Quer-López Pinel family's case has shown how seriously Spain takes attacks on women and its zero-tolerance approach to violent crime.
Missing on holiday
Diana, 18, from Spain's wealthiest town of Pozuelo de Alarcón in the Greater Madrid region, spent every summer with her family in the holiday home they owned in the Galicia coastal town of A Pobra do Caramiñal (A Coruña province) since she was three, including during and after her parents' messy divorce when she was 14 which led to her and Valeria suffering mental health problems.
Valeria had a history of panic attacks and self-harming and Diana was on anti-depressants and recovering from anorexia, but both girls were close to both parents and neither believed she would have run away from home.
She was looking forward to a brighter future at the time of her death – halfway through sixth form and studying for her driving theory test, having started working as a fashion model, and having just had the word 'Courage' tattooed on her hip as a reminder of what she had been through with her anorexia and survived.
Like hundreds of thousands of women do every night in Spain in complete safety, Diana walked the two kilometres back to her summer home from the local fiestas in A Pobra on the night of Sunday, August 21 – but her mum reported her missing when she saw, at 08.00 the next morning, that her bed had not been slept in.
The theory that she may, indeed, have run away from home began to carry more weight, although police and the family also suspected she may have been kidnapped and was being held against her will.
Given the family's very comfortable financial situation, it was even suspected a ransom note might follow.
Tracking her mobile phone connections, police found she had sent a WhatsApp message to a boy from her school in Pozuelo at 02.20 on August 22 to say she thought she was being followed by a man who seemed to be chatting her up from a distance.
This was her last message, and the phone showed she had travelled by car over a distance of about 15 kilometres to the town of Rianxo, with the signal suddenly disappearing on the bridge over the Taragoña port at around 04.00.
Months later, a fisherman found Diana's iPhone 5 in the river.
Even police believed they were looking for someone who was still alive until Abuín revealed the eight-metre-deep well hidden by a manhole cover in a disused drinks factory in Rianxo where he had dumped the young woman's body and returned a week later to tie her down with concrete blocks.
It transpired that he had seen her on the seafront road in A Pobra and, in a darkened part of the road, had grabbed her from behind, wrenched her phone from her, gagged her with duct tape and tied her hands and feet with plastic parcel straps, then taken her in the boot of his car to the unlit warehouse where he had raped her for over an hour on dirty mattresses.
He then strangled her with a parcel strap, evidenced not only by the broken hioides bone – where the neck joins the jaw – but also by the strap itself caught in her hair, which was fixed in a loop too small to fit round an adult human's neck, even one of Diana's slight build.
DNA evidence to prove sexual assault – which was crucial to the killer's being sentenced to permanent prison – was unavailable due to her having been submerged for 500 days.
But Diana's parents commissioned a second forensic examination which revealed outer physical signs and an 'unnatural body position' at the moment of death which could have had no other cause.
After over a million signatures on a Change.org petition urging the government not to scrap permanent reviewable prison sentences, Diana's family's campaign has borne fruit.
“Diana is smiling down from heaven today,” wrote her father on his Twitter site.
“Her rapist and murderer has been sentenced to prison on a permanent reviewable basis, a law that will save lives because this subject [Abuín] will never again be able to threaten or take the life of another innocent little girl.
“This is Diana's legacy – thank you, daughter, for your fight and your example, rest in peace.”
He wrote this post as a caption for the above photograph (from @JcQuer on Twitter).
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