Living In Spain: An Unsolved Salesas Murder In Oviedo

Letter From Oviedo

In one of Spain’s safest cities, a homicidal case went cold and remains unsolved today.

As a crime writer living in Oviedo, I eventually became curious about the city’s homicide rate. I wasn’t particularly surprised to discover that in some years this city of more than 224,000 people records no homicides at all.

That got me thinking.

In Baltimore, the 2025 homicide rate was about 23.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. Oviedo’s recent corresponding rate was 0.45 per100,000. With numbers this small, of course, a single killing can dramatically change Oviedo’s annual murder rate.

In a high-homicide American city, detectives may struggle with too many murders competing for time and resources. But could an exceptionally safe city have the opposite problem—too little accumulated experience investigating them? That question occurred to me I read the remarkable story of an Oviedo unsolved murder practically in my own backyard.

The Murder of José Manuel Fernández

Early on June 27, 2017, a porter at the Edificio Salesas building at Plaza Primo de Rivera 8 in central Oviedo was making his rounds. As he entered the basement garbage room, he discovered the dead body of José Manuel Fernández Vázquez, a 59-year-old tenant also known as Lolín.

Someone had stabbed him twice—once in the neck, once in the thorax. It is bone-chilling that he very likely had spent his final moments slowly and inexorably bleeding to death.

An Arrest in The Case

Within two days, police arrested José Luis D.R. on suspicion of Lolín's murder.

He was a reasonable suspect. José Luis knew the building, and surveillance cameras placed him there on the night of the murder. Prosecutors also believed they had a motive: jealousy.

Edificio Salesas, Plaza Primo 8, Oviedo AI construction of investigators leaving the building; BG by author

José Luis had previously been involved with the woman with whom Lolín had been living. However, she had died only days before Lolín was murdered, (reportedly an unrelated death).

Her death created an evidentiary problem for the prosecutors: two of the people best positioned to confirm whether tensions existed among the three were now dead. Prosecutors would have to establish the alleged jealousy by other evidence.

Salesas Murder in Oviedo: The Trial

At the January 2019 trial, the prosecution’s theory began running into more serious problems. Surveillance footage showed Lolín, an amputee who used crutches, inside the building for only about five minutes. According to the prosecution’s theory, within that short period, José Luis would have had to encounter Lolín, get/force him to the basement garbage room, stab him twice and leave.

Yet investigators found none of José Luis’s DNA at the murder scene. Nor was Fernández’s blood or other biological material found on José Luis’s clothing. The murder weapon was never recovered. Important witness testimony was inconsistent, and the jury wasn’t convinced that the alleged motive had been established.

After six hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted José Luis seven votes to two.

The prosecution and Fernández’s family appealed, but the Superior Court of Justice of Asturias upheld the acquittal. In unusually pointed language, the court said the case revealed an “insufficient investigation and a poorly founded accusation. ”The suspect was free. The murder remained unsolved.

The Pressure to Solve a Murder

Perhaps Oviedo’s rarity of murder had nothing to do with the failure to solve this

one. In any homicide, whether this Salesas murder in Oviedo or another, even experienced investigators can fall prey to tunnel vision—when a theory becomes a conviction, and contradictory evidence becomes something to explain away rather than follow. We don't know if that's happened in José Manuel Fernández’s case, but it remains unsolved nine years later, at the time of this writing). Sometimes the hardest part of solving a murder isn’t finding a suspect. It’s being willing to let one go.