Nobody knows, that night, if the murderer slept, ate, drank, watched television, walked or just waited or followed the victim. It is unknown if he had a photo of her, if he knew her or had been hired to kill her. In a story that was told so many times, the biggest enigma is who killed her.
But the two protagonists of this sad story dined on November 25, 2006 in two restaurants 975 kilometers away. Marcelo Macarrón and Nora DalmassoEach one of them celebrated with friends. He did it in Punta del Este, where he had won a golf tournament. In the end they toasted with champagne and went to sleep. She did it in Río Cuarto. They also toasted with champagne and said goodbye to the friends. He did not know, impossible for him to know, that at dawn on the 26th he would have an unexpected encounter.
The encounter with his murderer.
A murderer without a name or a face.
But first, Nora, 51, had a glass of champagne at her house in the Villa Golf neighborhood, removed her makeup, took a plunge bath and went to her daughter’s bedroom in a bathrobe because hers and his husband was renovating it. He undressed and lay down. He put his glasses and cell phone on the nightstand.
At that moment The murderer appeared, beat her, managed to vanish her, and then strangled her with the loop of his robe and with his hands. A mixed maneuver. Although it is strange that a hit man acted without a pistol or revolver, for the investigators the mastermind sought to confuse. “He hoped that we believed it was rape, something more related to an extramarital affair. It was as if he had tried to smear the crime scene “said a source in the case.
In the reconstruction of the crime that the forensics Raúl Torre and Osvaldo Raffo, with extensive experience in police cases, believe that Nora got into a fight with the aggressor. They concluded that the strangler exerted a force of 15 kilos for three to five minutes on the neck of Nora, who had injuries to the skull and right elbow. “It is about a victim fighting for her life, thrown to the ground and transported to the bed, or caught in it. You don’t always find a crime scene with demolished furniture, broken glass, and streaks of blood. “
For the experts of Nora’s family, The killer (s) were waiting for her at the house when she came home from dinner with her friends.
The killer appeared to be well informed. Because the fateful night Nora was going to be alone. As said, her husband was in Punta del Este with 15 other friends, her daughter Valentina, 16, slept at the house of a friend and her son Facundo, 19, was in Córdoba, where he was studying Law.
The last day she would be alive, it had started early for her. He was at the Casa Grassi funeral home, which was from his mother María Delia Grassi, the funeral and prepaid services company where he worked and then had lunch with his parents shortly after two in the afternoon.
When he got home there was the employee, Karina, who would ask him to take the weekend, and a group of painters, among them Gaston Zarate, that He was charged and detained and then released in the “parsley”.
Nora received a message on her cell phone from Polly, one of her friends: “Nori: today at ten o’clock he is reserved to go to eat at the Alvear. Call me to confirm your presence. That it does not decline. Polly ”. Nora took a nap on her daughter’s bed. When he woke up, the painters and the maid left. At 18 he visited her Silvia Albarracin, who saw Nora come out of the pool in a bikini and then put a towel on her head and another on her body. They talked about their husbands, about dinner, and Nora told him she was planning to blow dry.
Shortly after 9 p.m., he called his sister-in-law Silvia Macarrón, plastic artist. He went to La Casona del Arte, where Silvia exhibited two works.
When, shortly after 10 p.m., Nora arrived at the Alvear pub, owned by the former tennis player Agustín Calleri, in Alvear 923, in the heart of the city, the manager told him that a man had called to cancel dinner. Was it the murderer?
Surprised, Nora called one of her friends and told her that they were all on their way. They made a makeshift table for six: Rosarito, woman of Gonzalo gagna; Silvana, the wife of the provincial legislator Alfonso Mosquera; Graciela Bonino de Compagnucci; Paula Poli Fite de Ruiz; Patricia Funes from Carmine and Nora. The menu: salmon ravioli, brochettes and salads and they had wine.
Her friends saw Nora as always: carefree, jovial, making jokes, cheerful, beautiful, with her jeans or low-cut blouses, not for nothing as a young woman had she been Queen of Beauty in the Estudiantes de Río Cuarto club. They were unaware that All that day he had sent messages with Guillermo Albarración, Macarrón’s friend participating in the golf tournament. His wife, Silvia, was friends with Nora.
When it was the crime, the media came out lover listings and a T-shirt was sold that said “I was not with Norita.” Without respecting the pain of the victim’s family. But in the file it appears that her only lover was Albarracín and that data was incorporated not by gossip or rumor but because his testimony could perhaps contribute something to the cause.
That day, it needs to be clarified, Nora contacted her children Facundo and Valentina to see how they were doing. The same with her husband Macarrón, whom she had married 20 years ago.
Since then, 15 suspects have paraded in the case.
What happened between leaving the Alvear bar until entering your house?
Rosarito invited them to have Pommery champagne at her house. They all left at two. Nora got into her Bora.
Poli Ruiz was the penultimate person to see Nora alive. On his way home he passed the front of Dalmasso’s house and honked at her as she walked through the wooden gate. After a while, it started to rain.
Inside Nora’s house, the horror.
There was nothing, that day, that could twist fate. A visit that will save her from the matador. A trip. Spend the night elsewhere. Everything seemed to go as the assassin expected.
The crime was carried out in the early hours of Sunday, November 26. At noon, Nora’s mother called her several times, but there was no answer. Neither did her children and her husband.
Until at the request of Nora’s mother, who called the neighbor Pablo Radaelli, 72, to see if her daughter was home. He entered through the back door, which was open. He found her dead.
23 people paraded through the crime scene, including a priest friend of the family who covered Nora’s body out of modesty.
From that day on, the case was shipwrecked due to unfair accusations. One of them was the bricklayer Gastón Zátate, which ended up being dismissed.
Too they accused Facundo Macarrón, then 19 years old. He was indicted in the case on June 6, 2007. The prosecutor’s only argument against him was that the Macarrón lineage appeared in the DNA of the crime scene. As his father Marcelo was playing a golf tournament in Uruguay at the time of the femicide, suspicion (“slight”, as Di Santo pointed out), fell on his son.
They did not arrest him, the prosecutor himself considered that there was insufficient evidence. Nevertheless, his theory was that Facundo killed his mother and abused her. Not only that: the motive was sought in an alleged fight between mother and son over the young man’s sexual choice. Some expertise revolved around his private life, although they had nothing to do with what was being investigated.
In 2012, he was dismissed by the Rio Cuarto Control judge, Daniel Muñoz.
Facundo had two big injuries. One for his mother’s crime. The other, the unjust accusation. “They destroyed my youth”, he told Infobae on June 20, 2020, in his first media demonstration since his mother was killed.
In all that time, Facundo suffered hidden cameras, invasion of his privacy and had to see how the photos of his mother’s autopsy -which a policeman offered to the media in exchange for money (the author of this note was a witness to that) – appeared on television.
Every time he tries to write something to remember his mother, he erases it. As if the weight of injustice did not let him write the unforgettable moments he spent with his mother, such as when she accompanied him to buy clothes or listened to the classics of the 80s and 90s.
A year ago, Facundo wrote to Infobae:
“You can imagine that from that, and from so many other atrocities that they committed in the judicial investigation, my basic confidence was destroyed. Especially when I have to publicly remember Mom. And this happened not only to me, but to many other members of my family, friends and friends of Mom, who prefer to remember her in silence because every time they naively talked about her, what they said was interpreted for the least thought or the side. more thoughtful (read, premeditated) for researchers: blaming someone in the family inner circle. This is how most of these crimes are closed. Easy. Justice, it does not matter, the important thing is to have a convicted person or condemned person, today the objective is my old man ”.
“With all this I tell you, you can imagine how difficult it is for me to talk to someone, even with the trust and respect that I have for you as a journalist, about the quality of person that my mother was. She doesn’t have to spend time so she can talk to you about her without fear of hurting dad or trauma, there just has to be justice, and this involves investigating who really did commit the horrible crime, and convicting that person. Not to mention ending the persecution against my family, today against my old man. It is so simple but so difficult to understand for those who owe us that justice service, that I do not know if one day we will be able to have the peace of mind of being able to remember it, in public, having done justice. I do not lose the hope”.
His father, now, is accused of being the mastermind of the murder, when before another prosecutor had accused him of being the material author. That is, take a ghost plane from Punta del Esta, enter the house in Río Cuarto, strangle her and return on that plane to Uruguay.
The trial will be next year.
So much Marcelo, Facundo and Valentina Macarrón will try tomorrow to remember how bright their mother was. “We will seek, once and for all, to remember her in peace”, they say, struck by the irreparable pain of loss, the memories lived and the judicial inconstancy.
At the same time, a faceless assassin seems, again, to get away with it.
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