Latest / Haunted Horror Stories / The Crown, the Architect, and the Open Door of Death
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: There is a version of this story where a seven-year-old
- 0:07Speaker 1: girl walks home from her neighbor's house on a Sunday
- 0:10Speaker 1: morning in Bogota, and nothing happens. That version does not exist.
- 0:17Speaker 1: What exists instead is a silver plastic crown, a building
- 0:21Speaker 1: with 43 apartments, and a name that Columbia has never
- 0:25Speaker 1: been able to stop saying. This case stayed with me
- 0:28Speaker 1: long after I stopped reading about it. Not because of
- 0:32Speaker 1: the crime itself, but because of how many doors stayed
- 0:36Speaker 1: open when the trial ended. On the morning of December 4th, 2016,
- 0:41Speaker 1: Juliana Sambani left her home in the Bosque Calderón neighborhood
- 0:45Speaker 1: of Bogotá. She was seven years old. She was wearing
- 0:49Speaker 1: the kind of clothes a child wears when the day
- 0:53Speaker 1: feels ordinary. Because it did. Because it was. Right up
- 0:57Speaker 1: until it wasn't, by 11 o'clock that night, Police found
- 1:01Speaker 1: her body inside a vacant duplex apartment in a building
- 1:05Speaker 1: called ECU 66. She had been sexually assaulted. She had
- 1:11Speaker 1: been killed. And the building where she died had been
- 1:14Speaker 1: constructed by the family of the man who killed her.
- 1:17Speaker 1: That detail alone changes the shape of everything that comes after.
- 1:22Speaker 1: Juliana was born in 2009 in El Tambor, a small
- 1:26Speaker 1: rural area in the Cauca region of southwestern Colombia. in
- 1:30Speaker 1: a community called Lost Milagros, the Miracles. Her family was Yonakona,
- 1:37Speaker 1: an indigenous people of the Andean Highlands. Her father, Juvencio Samboni,
- 1:42Speaker 1: worked construction. Her mother, Nelly Menyos, took domestic work wherever
- 1:48Speaker 1: she could find it. They had come to Bogota, the
- 1:51Speaker 1: way many families from Makaka come to Bogota, looking for
- 1:55Speaker 1: the kind of stability that the city promises and rarely delivers.
- 2:01Speaker 1: They lived in Bosque Calderon, a working-class hillside neighborhood in
- 2:05Speaker 1: the eastern part of the city. The streets there are
- 2:08Speaker 1: narrow and steep, the houses pressed close to each other.
- 2:12Speaker 1: It is the kind of neighborhood where children play in
- 2:15Speaker 1: front of their own doors, where parents watch from windows,
- 2:19Speaker 1: where the distance between safe and unsafe is measured in seconds.
- 2:23Speaker 1: Juliana had a little sister named Nicole. The two of
- 2:27Speaker 1: them played together with a silver plastic crown, the kind
- 2:30Speaker 1: that comes in a party favor bag or falls out
- 2:33Speaker 1: of a piñata. Juliana wore it and called herself a queen.
- 2:38Speaker 1: That crown is the last warm image this story has
- 2:41Speaker 1: of her, and it belongs here before everything else. Eleven
- 2:45Speaker 1: blocks away, in a different kind of Bogota entirely, stood
- 2:50Speaker 1: the Uribe Noguera family, stood the Uribe Noguera family. Rafael
- 2:55Speaker 1: Uribe Noguera was 38 years old in 2016. He was
- 3:01Speaker 1: an architect, trained and practicing, the son of Rafael Uribe Rivera,
- 3:08Speaker 1: the dean of the architecture school at Universidad Javeriana. one
- 3:12Speaker 1: of Colombia's most prestigious universities. His mother was Maria Isabel Nogura.
- 3:18Speaker 1: His siblings, Francisco and Catalina, worked alongside him in the
- 3:23Speaker 1: family's construction company, Lascaux Construction Guiones, SAS, founded in 2010
- 3:31Speaker 1: with a capital of approximately $ 40 million. ECU-66, the building
- 3:38Speaker 1: where Giuliano would die, was one of theirs. 43 apartments,
- 3:43Speaker 1: a duplex on the upper floors that sat vacant and silent, waiting.
- 3:48Speaker 1: Raphael lived in the adjacent building, ECU-64. He knew ECU-66
- 3:54Speaker 1: the way you know a place you have built. Every door,
- 3:58Speaker 1: every staircase, every room that no one had moved into yet.
- 4:03Speaker 1: At approximately 8 in the morning on December 4th, Security
- 4:07Speaker 1: cameras recorded Rafael leaving ECU-64 in a silver truck. The
- 4:13Speaker 1: building's guard later told investigators that Rafael's manner seemed uncertain, hesitant.
- 4:20Speaker 1: The word he used, translated carefully, was that Rafael seemed
- 4:25Speaker 1: to be reconsidering something. That camera footage also contained something
- 4:30Speaker 1: investigators would not immediately emphasise. The truck had passed through
- 4:35Speaker 1: Juliana's neighborhood not once before that morning, but twice. That
- 4:40Speaker 1: detail will matter. It will matter in a way that
- 4:43Speaker 1: makes the word impulse very difficult to use with a
- 4:46Speaker 1: straight face. One hour after leaving his building, Rafael Uribe
- 4:51Speaker 1: Noguera took Juliana Sampani from the street in front of
- 4:55Speaker 1: her home. Her family was inside. Nicole was probably still asleep.
- 5:00Speaker 1: The Crown was somewhere in the apartment. waiting for a
- 5:03Speaker 1: queen who would not come back to claim it. The
- 5:06Speaker 1: morning of December 4th, 2016, began the way most Sunday
- 5:11Speaker 1: mornings began in Bosque Calderón. Juvencio Samboní had already left
- 5:17Speaker 1: for work before the sun was fully up. Nelly Muñoz
- 5:21Speaker 1: was inside. Juliana and her little sister Nicole stepped outside together.
- 5:27Speaker 1: The way they always did on weekend mornings, into the
- 5:30Speaker 1: narrow street that ran in front of their building, Juliana
- 5:33Speaker 1: was wearing a white dress that day. She was seven
- 5:36Speaker 1: years old. What happened next took less than two minutes.
- 5:40Speaker 1: Investigators would later recover footage from more than 200 security
- 5:45Speaker 1: cameras positioned across that stretch of Bogota. The footage told
- 5:50Speaker 1: a story that the defense would spend months trying to
- 5:53Speaker 1: reframe as chaotic, impulsive, and drug-fueled. The cameras told a
- 5:58Speaker 1: different story entirely. At approximately eight in the morning, A
- 6:02Speaker 1: silver truck left the underground parking of ECU-64, the building
- 6:07Speaker 1: where Rafael Uribe Nogra kept his primary residence. The building
- 6:12Speaker 1: was less than a 10-minute walk from Juliana's home. The
- 6:16Speaker 1: truck moved through the neighborhood, then turned around and came
- 6:20Speaker 1: back through the same stretch of street a second time.
- 6:23Speaker 1: No stop, no errand, no destination. Two passes through the
- 6:28Speaker 1: same block, captured on camera, logged with timestamps, That detail
- 6:33Speaker 1: does not fit any version of an impulsive act. Two
- 6:36Speaker 1: hours had passed between those first recorded passes, and the
- 6:40Speaker 1: moment Giuliana was taken, that is not the timeline of
- 6:44Speaker 1: a man who acted without thinking. That is the timeline
- 6:48Speaker 1: of a man who left, came back, waited, and chose.
- 6:53Speaker 1: Around nine in the morning, Juliana was separated from Nicole.
- 6:58Speaker 1: The exact mechanics of how Raphael brought a seven-year-old girl
- 7:01Speaker 1: into that building without being stopped by anyone have never
- 7:05Speaker 1: been publicly detailed. What is known is where she was taken.
- 7:09Speaker 1: The duplex apartment inside ECU 66, the 43-unit building his
- 7:15Speaker 1: own family had designed, built, and still controlled. A building
- 7:20Speaker 1: Raphael knew completely. A building where he would have known
- 7:24Speaker 1: which floors were vacant, which stairs were unmonitored, which rooms
- 7:29Speaker 1: no one would enter. At approximately 11 in the morning,
- 7:33Speaker 1: a delivery was placed to the ECU-66 apartment. Cooking oil,
- 7:39Speaker 1: a lighter, cigarettes. The order was registered. The timestamp exists
- 7:44Speaker 1: in the investigation files. Two hours after taking Juliana, Rafael
- 7:49Speaker 1: Uribe Noguera placed a delivery order to the apartment where
- 7:53Speaker 1: she was being held. That single fact stopped every defense
- 7:57Speaker 1: argument about mental incapacity called. You do not place a
- 8:01Speaker 1: food delivery order if you have lost control of yourself.
- 8:05Speaker 1: You do not think about what you need in that
- 8:08Speaker 1: room if you are not thinking about what is happening
- 8:12Speaker 1: in that room. The defense would argue throughout the trial
- 8:15Speaker 1: that Raphael's documented drug use had compromised his judgment to
- 8:19Speaker 1: the point of diminished responsibility. The delivery timestamp made that
- 8:23Speaker 1: argument structurally impossible to sustain. Whatever state Raphael was in,
- 8:29Speaker 1: He was present enough to plan, to order, and to wait.
- 8:34Speaker 1: Shortly after noon, cameras captured Rafael walking from ECU 66
- 8:41Speaker 1: to ECU 64, his primary residence. He changed his clothes.
- 8:47Speaker 1: Then he walked back. In the afternoon, two people arrived.
- 8:52Speaker 1: Catalina Uribe Noguera entered ECU 66. At 3.32 in the afternoon,
- 8:59Speaker 1: her brother Francisco arrived. Approximately 20 minutes later, at 5.27,
- 9:06Speaker 1: all three of them walked out of the building together.
- 9:10Speaker 1: Juliana was still inside. That sequence, the arrivals, the overlap,
- 9:16Speaker 1: the coordinated exit, became the center of the encabrimiento, prosecution,
- 9:22Speaker 1: against Francisco Ramos. and Catalina. Investigators believed the siblings had
- 9:27Speaker 1: entered that building, knowing what had happened, and left without
- 9:31Speaker 1: calling anyone. More than 25 text messages had been deleted
- 9:36Speaker 1: from the phones of both siblings by the time investigators
- 9:39Speaker 1: accessed them. According to the prosecution's account, the deletion was
- 9:44Speaker 1: not disputed. What those messages said was never recovered. The
- 9:49Speaker 1: defense argued that neither Francisco nor Catalina had seen the child,
- 9:55Speaker 1: had known she was there, or had understood what their
- 9:58Speaker 1: brother had done. The tribunal ultimately found that the prosecution
- 10:02Speaker 1: had not proven otherwise, beyond a reasonable doubt. Francisco and
- 10:07Speaker 1: Catalina were acquitted. The acquittal was upheld on appeal in
- 10:11Speaker 1: December of 2019. Legally, the question closed. It has never
- 10:17Speaker 1: closed anywhere else. At some point that evening, Rafael was
- 10:22Speaker 1: brought to Clínica Montserrat with what was described as an
- 10:25Speaker 1: apparent overdose. Francisco was the one who informed police of
- 10:30Speaker 1: his location. Investigators would later describe this as the moment
- 10:34Speaker 1: the family's account of events crystallized into a single, coordinated narrative.
- 10:40Speaker 1: Rafael had taken something, lost control, and now needed medical care.
- 10:46Speaker 1: The focus shifted to his condition. The building stood empty
- 10:50Speaker 1: and unguarded. It was nearly 11 at night when police
- 10:54Speaker 1: entered ECU 66. They found Juliana under the jacuzzi. She
- 11:00Speaker 1: had no clothing on. Her body had been covered in
- 11:03Speaker 1: cooking oil. Her clothes had been placed inside the tank
- 11:07Speaker 1: of the toilet in the bathroom. There was a bow-tied
- 11:10Speaker 1: ribbon near her body. There was also a piece of
- 11:13Speaker 1: women's underwear. in the scene that did not belong to
- 11:16Speaker 1: Juliana and has never been publicly attributed to anyone. Carlos Valdez,
- 11:21Speaker 1: then director of the National Institute of Legal Medicine, confirmed
- 11:26Speaker 1: the cause of death, mechanical asphyxia by suffocation combined with
- 11:31Speaker 1: manual pressure applied to her throat. She had also suffered
- 11:34Speaker 1: sexual abuse and severe physical harm. The genetic material recovered
- 11:40Speaker 1: from Juliana's body was matched to Rafael Uribe Nigura. She
- 11:45Speaker 1: was seven years old. Her white dress was in a
- 11:48Speaker 1: toilet tank. Five days after Juliana's body was found, Fernando
- 11:53Speaker 1: Machan-Mario was discovered dead in his home. Machan-Mario was the
- 11:58Speaker 1: security guard on duty at ECU-66. On the morning of
- 12:03Speaker 1: December 4th, he had already spoken to investigators. He had
- 12:07Speaker 1: described seeing Rafael that morning, nervous, behaving in a way
- 12:13Speaker 1: that had struck him as off. He was a witness.
- 12:16Speaker 1: He was the witness closest to the entry point of
- 12:19Speaker 1: that building on the day Juliana was brought inside. On
- 12:22Speaker 1: December 9th, he was gone. The official determination was possible suicide.
- 12:29Speaker 1: No criminal charges were filed in connection with his death.
- 12:33Speaker 1: No alternative explanation was investigated publicly. The case was not
- 12:39Speaker 1: formally linked to the Samboni investigation, and yet, the timing
- 12:44Speaker 1: sat inside the public consciousness of Columbia. like a splinter
- 12:48Speaker 1: that could not be worked out. Five days after the
- 12:52Speaker 1: most scrutinized crime in the country that year, the one
- 12:56Speaker 1: person positioned at the front door of the building where
- 12:59Speaker 1: Juliana died was found dead. Authorities pointed to suicide. The
- 13:04Speaker 1: word possible did not disappear from any official record. For
- 13:08Speaker 1: Nellie and Juvencio, The death of Merchan Mirelo was not
- 13:12Speaker 1: an administrative footnote. It arrived as confirmation of something they
- 13:17Speaker 1: had already begun to feel, that the forces capable of
- 13:20Speaker 1: protecting their daughter were also capable of determining what could
- 13:25Speaker 1: be known and what would remain obscured. They were a
- 13:28Speaker 1: construction worker and a domestic employee from Makaka. The Uribe
- 13:33Speaker 1: Nogura family had $ 40 million in company Kakato and had
- 13:38Speaker 1: built the building where their daughter died. A psychic named
- 13:41Speaker 1: Aida Valasar had been consulted during the search before Juliana's
- 13:46Speaker 1: body was found. Valencia described feeling extreme anguish during the session.
- 13:52Speaker 1: She told the family that she did not believe Juliana
- 13:55Speaker 1: would be found alive. The family had reached out to
- 13:58Speaker 1: her because the official search had produced nothing for hours,
- 14:02Speaker 1: and a mother standing in the street outside an apartment
- 14:05Speaker 1: building in Bogota had nothing left to try. Valencia was
- 14:10Speaker 1: not an official source. Her account carried no legal weight,
- 14:14Speaker 1: but she had been right, and that fact settled somewhere
- 14:18Speaker 1: in the public retelling of this case and never fully left.
- 14:21Speaker 1: This is where the rational architecture of the investigation began
- 14:25Speaker 1: to develop its first visible cracks, not in the forensic evidence,
- 14:30Speaker 1: which was overwhelming, but in the surrounding structure. Key witness
- 14:35Speaker 1: dead five days after the fact, with no further inquiry.
- 14:40Speaker 1: Text messages deleted and unrecoverable. A piece of women's underwear
- 14:45Speaker 1: in the scene with no identified owner. A bow on
- 14:49Speaker 1: a child's body. An acquittal built on the absence of
- 14:53Speaker 1: recovered evidence. There is no version of this story where
- 14:57Speaker 1: everything makes sense. What investigators had was a conviction. Certain.
- 15:03Speaker 1: evidence-backed and final, sitting inside a larger set of questions
- 15:08Speaker 1: that the conviction itself could not answer. Rafael Uribe Noguera
- 15:13Speaker 1: was found guilty. He was sentenced to 51 years and
- 15:17Speaker 1: 10 months, later raised to 58 years on appeal by
- 15:22Speaker 1: the family's legal team. He confessed on January 11th, 2017,
- 15:26Speaker 1: more than a month after the crime. is currently held
- 15:32Speaker 1: in Latramakua Prison in Valladolpa between 2019 and 2020. 2.
- 15:40Speaker 1: He redeemed 14 months and 17 days of his sentence
- 15:45Speaker 1: through architectural work, drafting plans and designs from inside his cell.
- 15:50Speaker 1: The sentence is real, the time he is drawing is real,
- 15:54Speaker 1: and the questions that sit outside the courtroom record remain
- 15:58Speaker 1: exactly where they were left. Unanswered. Unarchived. Still open. Rafael
- 16:05Speaker 1: Uribe Noguera was convicted on March 29th, 2017. The Tribunal
- 16:11Speaker 1: Superior de Bogota sentenced him to 51 years and 10 months.
- 16:17Speaker 1: Juliana's family appealed. The final sentence was 58 years. He
- 16:23Speaker 1: is serving that sentence at La Tramacua prison in Valledupa,
- 16:27Speaker 1: a facility known as one of Colombia's harshest. And yet,
- 16:31Speaker 1: between 2019 and 2020, too, Raphael redeemed 14 months and
- 16:33Speaker 1: 17 days of that sentence. The method? Architectural drawings. The
- 16:44Speaker 1: same professional skill that built the duplex where Juliana died
- 16:48Speaker 1: now quietly shortened the time he would spend paying for it.
- 16:53Speaker 1: There is no version of this story where that detail
- 16:56Speaker 1: doesn't leave a mark. Francisco and Catalina Uribe Noguera were
- 17:01Speaker 1: acquitted on August 12th, 2019. The Tribunal Superior ratified that
- 17:08Speaker 1: decision in December of the same year. The charge was concealment.
- 17:13Speaker 1: the court found that reasonable doubt remained. Partly because the doctors,
- 17:18Speaker 1: the prosecution itself, had called to the stand, confirmed Raphael's
- 17:23Speaker 1: overdose posed a genuine medical risk, The very witnesses meant
- 17:27Speaker 1: to support the case against the siblings ended up undermining it.
- 17:33Speaker 1: 25 deleted text messages from their phones were never recovered.
- 17:37Speaker 1: That gap in the record is not evidence of guilt.
- 17:40Speaker 1: It is not evidence of innocence either. It is simply
- 17:44Speaker 1: a silence that the case closed around without ever filling.
- 17:48Speaker 1: Fernando Merchan Murillo, the security guard who had seen Rafael
- 17:53Speaker 1: nervous on the morning of December 4th, who had told
- 17:56Speaker 1: investigators what he observed, was found dead in his home
- 18:01Speaker 1: on December 9th, 2006, five days after Giuliana's body was discovered.
- 18:07Speaker 1: The ruling was possible suicide. No charges were filed. No
- 18:12Speaker 1: connection to the case was formally established. The case officially
- 18:16Speaker 1: considers that thread closed. Whether the listener does is a
- 18:20Speaker 1: different question. Giovanzio Sambonese, and Nelly Munoz returned to Kaka
- 18:25Speaker 1: after the trial. The family Uribe Noguera never called them.
- 18:31Speaker 1: Not once. No condolence, no acknowledgement, no gesture across the
- 18:37Speaker 1: distance between two families whose lives had been destroyed by
- 18:41Speaker 1: the same man. A lot in Popayan was mentioned at
- 18:45Speaker 1: some point. Land, a place to rebuild. It was never delivered.
- 18:50Speaker 1: A housing subsidy was promised by the state. At the
- 18:53Speaker 1: time this story closes, it had not arrived either. The
- 18:57Speaker 1: warmth moment here is hard to name cleanly, but this
- 19:01Speaker 1: is where the weight landed for me. Not in the verdict,
- 19:05Speaker 1: not in the sentence. It was in learning that Juvencio
- 19:09Speaker 1: and Nelly had gone home to Coco with nothing. Not
- 19:12Speaker 1: a single word from the family whose son had ended everything.
- 19:16Speaker 1: That silence has its own shape. It sits differently than
- 19:20Speaker 1: the absence of a phone call. It is an active choice,
- 19:24Speaker 1: made every day since December 4th, 2016. Nicole, Juliana's younger sister,
- 19:31Speaker 1: was seven when her family moved to Bogota. She was
- 19:35Speaker 1: seven when Juliana was taken. She grew up with the
- 19:38Speaker 1: case as context, with her parents giving interviews, attending hearings,
- 19:44Speaker 1: fighting for a sentence that kept getting appealed. With a
- 19:47Speaker 1: brother born after the loss, named Juliana, Andres, a name
- 19:51Speaker 1: chosen deliberately, carrying the shape of a sister he would
- 19:55Speaker 1: never meet, that boy will grow up knowing who he
- 19:59Speaker 1: was named for, knowing why the crown that Juliana and
- 20:03Speaker 1: Nicole used to pass between them on Sunday mornings in
- 20:07Speaker 1: their apartment in Bosca Calderon The silver plastic one, bent
- 20:12Speaker 1: a little at the base, was never mentioned again after
- 20:15Speaker 1: the day she disappeared. Some objects don't survive the thing
- 20:19Speaker 1: that happens after them. There are cases where the legal
- 20:22Speaker 1: outcome and the human outcome align, where the sentence handed
- 20:26Speaker 1: down feels proportional to what was taken. This is not
- 20:30Speaker 1: always one of those cases, and the people who lived
- 20:33Speaker 1: it know the difference better than anyone. 58 years for
- 20:37Speaker 1: Raphael Arabi Noguerrer, a number large enough to feel like
- 20:41Speaker 1: justice from a distance. But Giovenzio still lays bricks. Nelly
- 20:46Speaker 1: still wakes up in a house where Giuliana is not.
- 20:50Speaker 1: Nicole is older now than Giuliana will ever be, and
- 20:53Speaker 1: Giuliana Andres carries a name. was already grieving before he
- 20:57Speaker 1: was born. The question the investigation left open, the women's
- 21:02Speaker 1: underwear found in the duplex belonging to no identified person,
- 21:07Speaker 1: was never publicly attributed. It remains in the case file
- 21:11Speaker 1: without a name next to it, a detail that fits
- 21:14Speaker 1: nowhere and was never made to fit. Fernando Merchan Murillo
- 21:19Speaker 1: is listed as a possible suicide. The 25 deleted texts
- 21:25Speaker 1: are listed as unrecovered. The lot in Popayan is listed
- 21:29Speaker 1: as undelivered. What the record calls closed, the people inside
- 21:34Speaker 1: it experience as ongoing. On a Sunday morning, in a
- 21:37Speaker 1: neighborhood called Los Milagros, the Miracles, a girl who had
- 21:42Speaker 1: been born Yonacorna, who had traveled from the southern highlands
- 21:46Speaker 1: to the capital so her father could build things, who
- 21:49Speaker 1: liked to pretend she was a queen, got up and
- 21:52Speaker 1: got dressed and walked outside. She was seven years old.
- 21:57Speaker 1: She had a sister waiting for her inside. She did
- 22:00Speaker 1: not come back. That is the last confirmed image. A
- 22:04Speaker 1: door left open. A sister still waiting. And somewhere in Valladupur,
- 22:10Speaker 1: in a cell at Latramakua, an architect draws plans for
- 22:14Speaker 1: buildings he will never construct. And each completed page takes
- 22:18Speaker 1: one more day off a sentence that cannot take back
- 22:21Speaker 1: a single thing it cost. This show is made by
- 22:25Speaker 1: Oba Media.