MADRID, 2 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The confessed murderer of Juana Canal, the woman who disappeared 19 years ago in Ciudad Lineal and whose crime has just been resolved, stated during his statement before the Ávila judge that the victim threatened to stick a knife in him and blame him during the discussion in which he would have died accidentally after hitting her to avoid an attack, legal sources have informed Europa Press.
The murderer of Juana Canal entered the Brieva prison, near Ávila, last Friday for a crime of homicide in the field of gender violence.
He did so after confessing to the judge that he killed her with a blow and that he dismembered her into two pieces in the bathtub to transport her in suitcases to Navalacruz, where he buried her in two holes on land near a family farm.
In his statement, Jesús Pradales reported that the discussion began after the woman stole 600 euros from him and locked herself in the bathroom, threatening to flush the money down the toilet. After leaving it, Juana would have taken a knife and would have threatened to stab him to say that it was him, according to her account.
The victim called the Police to report that she was being attacked and the agents appeared at the address on Boldano Street. Finally, the police left. Next, the detainee packed his bags in the room to leave the house and when leaving it, he extended his arm to move the victim away and she fell.
“I saw that she was still on the ground with her eyes open. I realized that she was dead. I was scared,” he told the judge. It was then that she decided to cut it in two with a knife. He put her in two suitcases and took her 90 kilometers to Navalacruz. Near her farm, she dug two holes with a hoe and put her remains.
Returning to Madrid, he threw the suitcases into a container on Calle Alcalá and wrote a note to Sergio, Juana’s son, in which he stated that his mother had left after taking quite a few pills.
According to the summary, Jesús filed a false complaint at the Carabanchel National Police Station in the early hours of February 24, 2003, in which he made reference to alleged physical attacks and injuries at the hands of Juana during said argument after which she disappears.
Two days earlier, one of the woman’s children found a note written by her mother’s partner, telling her that they had had a heated argument and that she had run away and had not been able to find her.
According to the proceedings, Jesús always hid the alleged attacks he suffered from his relatives and his current partner and limited himself to commenting that the complaint was for allegedly having stolen about 700 euros from Juana, who even claimed his son.
The summary shows that Jesús Pradales was arrested in April 2006, three years after the crime, for mistreatment of his partner at a gas station in front of their children.
Figure that on April 18, 2006 he was arrested by the National Police in Getafe for the crime of attacking authority and ill-treatment of his partner by “assaulting her in the back of a gas station, in the presence of the children minors” of women.
There are also two other arrests carried out by the Civil Guard, in December 2003 and May 2005, for crimes against traffic safety and others.
Juana Canal’s ex-boyfriend, Jesús P.H., was arrested in Madrid last Wednesday. The main line of investigation pointed to the fact that he killed his partner at the time and then hid his body after dismembering it.
The area where the remains of Juana Canal are sought is the same where the remains of this woman have been found: first, in 2019, a skull and a tibia found by a hiker and, a few weeks ago, remains of a femur and bones of the hip area in a raid by members of the Civil Guard and the National Police.
