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The Girl with the Pink Backpack: DNA That Broke a Town · Haunted Horror Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: She left the house at 11.30 in the morning, carrying
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: a pink backpack, a book of Julio Cortázar short stories,
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: and a promise to be back by 4.30. She never
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: came back. Two days later, on December 30th of 2014,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: her body was found half buried in the sand dunes
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: of Bar de Palizas, Uruguay, four kilometers away. from where
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: she had been sleeping. Lola Chomnales was 15 years old.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: The investigation that followed would take almost 8 years to
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: name a suspect. And when it did, the answer came
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: not from witnesses or confessions, but from the blood on
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: her backpack and a chain of DNA that stretched through
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: eleven siblings across three different fathers. There is something in
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: this case that never let me go. Not the cruelty
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: of what happened, though that is real, but the precision
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: of the disappearance. A small beach town. A single road.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Three hundred people in high season. And still, She vanished
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: in broad daylight, in the hours between noon and four
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: in the afternoon, without a single person coming forward to
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: say they saw anything at all. This is the story
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: of Lola Chongnalis, and the truth, when it finally arrived,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: did not look like justice. It looked like a family
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: tree drawn in blood. Barra de Balizaz sits at the
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: southeastern edge of Uruguay, where the Atlantic coast narrows into
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: a thin strip of sand between the ocean and the
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Laguna de Castillos. There are no traffic lights, there are
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: no hotels. In December, the population swells from a handful
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: of permanent residents to a few hundred seasonal visitors. And
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: that combination, remote, relaxed, trusted, was exactly why the Chomilazas
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: family said, yes. When Claudia Fernandez invited Lola for the
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: holiday week, Claudia was Lola's godmother. The two families had
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: known each other for 25 years. Claudia's husband, Hernan, was
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: going with two of their children, one of them 14
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: years old, close in age to Lola. It was the
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: kind of inditation that needs no second thought. Lola Luna
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: Chomneles Belmont was born in Buenos Aires on November 4th, 1919.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: She was extroverted in the way that unsettles quieter people.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Not loud, but fully present. She had been a vegetarian
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: since she was 12. Not as a phase, but as
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: a decision. She danced. She read, she had plans, specific ones.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: She wanted to become an acrobat and a psychoanalyst, which
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: sounds like a contradiction until you understand how she thought.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: which was always from the body outward. Her parents had
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: promised her a trip to New York for January 2015.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: She arrived in Barra de Belizes on December 26th at 3.30
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: in the afternoon. The first day was unremarkable in the
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: best way. She went to the beach with the group
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: the second evening, December 27th. Hernan took her and his
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: son to a drum circle. the center of the village.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: At some point, her nan and his son left early.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: Lola stayed with a group of people she had just met,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: then walked home and went to sleep. Nothing happened that
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: matters because of what came next. On the morning of
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: December 28th, Lola decided to go to the beach alone.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: She left at 11.30. She packed her pink backpack with
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: a towel, a water bottle, roughly 2,000 Uruguayan pesos, around $ 50,
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: and her Cortaza book. She left her cell phone behind
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: because there was no signal in Belizas. Before she walked
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: out the door, she told Claudia she would be back
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: by 4.30. That detail, the time, 4.30, said out loud
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: to a person who would be waiting, became the first
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: timestamp stamp in an investigation that would stretch across eight years.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: She did not come back at 4.30. Claudia searched the beach,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: then she drove toward Pantadelaste, checking stops along the coast road.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Hernán searched from one end of Balizas to the other.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: No one had seen a 15-year-old girl with a pink backpack.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: By 10 that night, Claudia called Lola's parents in Buenos Aires.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: formal police report was filed after that call, not before,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: which would later become a point of friction no one
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: fully resolved. Forensic analysis would eventually place the time of
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: death between 1 in the afternoon and 4 in the
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: afternoon on December 28th. That window means Lola was killed
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: within the same few hours She was simply supposed to
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: be at the beach, reading in a town where everyone
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: knew everyone, on a coast with one road in and
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: one road out. The body was found two days later,
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: but the pink backpack, the one she carried out the
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: door that morning, was not recovered until January 14th of 2015.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: It was found in a sand dune near the site
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: where Lola had been discovered. Inside, the towel still there,
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: and on the towel, blood. That backpack would sit as
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: evidence for seven years before a single geneticist looked at
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: it differently than anyone had before. The search began the
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: way searches always begin, in small places, with the certainty
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: that she had to be somewhere close. Claudia walked the
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: beach first, She called Lola's name into the wind and
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: got nothing back but the sound of the Atlantic. When
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: the shore turned up empty, she and Hernan drove the
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: coast road from one end of Balizaz to the other.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: They checked with neighbors. They asked at the small center
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: of town. Nobody had seen a 15-year-old girl with a
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: pink backpack since late morning. By 10 o'clock that night,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Claudia picked up the phone and called Lola's parents in
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Buenos Aires. That call is where the timeline gets complicated.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: The formal police report was not filed before that call.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: It was filed after, in a town of 300 seasonal residents.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: in a place where everyone notices a stranger. More than
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: five hours passed between the moment Lola failed to appear
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: and the moment authorities were officially told. Investigators would return
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: to that gap later. They never found a satisfying answer
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: for it. The first days of the search produced nothing.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Uruguayan police and Prefectura combed the dunes in the scrub
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: forest between the houses in the shore. The family arrived,
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: the media arrived, shortly after. Barra de Belizas is a
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: strip of coast that in summer swells with visitors, and
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: in winter empties to almost nothing. But in late December
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: of 2014, people were still around. Someone had to have
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: seen something. Witnesses were interviewed, accounts were collected, none of
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: them placed Lola in danger. none of them placed anyone
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: near her. In the hours the forensic window would later
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: identify as the time of her death, December 30th, two
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: days after she disappeared, and two days before the new year,
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: a figure moving through the dunes came across something half
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: buried in the sand. The accounts of who found Lola's
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: body contradict each other in ways that were never fully reconciled.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: One version names a member of the Uruguayan prefector on patrol.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Another names the 14-year-old son of a local artisan. A
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: third describes a fisherman, 30 to 35 years old, following
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: marks in the sand. That last version carries its own problem.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: It had rained before the discovery, heavy enough rain to
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: erase footprints, and police had already swept the area. The
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: marks the fisherman was said to have followed should not
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: have been there. Lola was found four kilometers from the
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: house where she had been sleeping. Summer buried between the dunes,
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: a blow to the left side of her head, multiple
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: cuts to her neck made with something sharp, the kind
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: of blade found in a kitchen, and the sand itself
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: pressed close enough and long enough to contribute to her death.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: There was no confirmed sexual assault. The pink backpack did
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: not appear until January 14th, two weeks after her body,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: in a dune near the same site. Inside, her towel,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: stained with blood, a detail that would sit in an
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: evidence locker for seven years before anyone understood what it contained.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: The first person formally detained was not a stranger to
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: the investigation. Ángel Eduardo Moreira, 27 years old, went by
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: the nickname El Cachila. An anonymous tip in February of
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: 2015 led police to him. His account, when he gave it,
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: was specific enough to be strange. He said he had
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: crossed paths with Lola on the beach. He offered her
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: a small religious card, a prayer card, the kind vendors
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: sell to tourists. She accepted it, he said, and then
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: told him she felt dizzy. He walked with her toward
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: the trees. He said he took her pulse twice and
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: felt nothing. He said he then left and boarded a
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: bus to Montevideo. He said he did not report it
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: because he did not want to get involved. His DNA
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: was tested in 2015. It came back negative. He was released.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: Henan and his 14-year-old son had also been detained in
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: those first weeks. Their accounts of December 28th contained contradictions
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: about timing. They were held for several days. Their DNA
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: was also tested. It also came back negative. The forensic
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: window for Lola's death did not place them at the scene.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: They were ruled out and released. The investigation spread outward
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: from there and kept hitting walls. The town's small population
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: meant almost everyone who had been present during those days
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: was interviewed at some point. The person who discovered the
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: body was questioned. The explanation of how they found her,
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: following tracks through sand that should have been washed clean,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: drew scrutiny. No charges followed. The case went cold in
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: the way. Cases go cold when evidence points everywhere and
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: nowhere at the same time. Then there was Daniel. He
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: went by El Terezo. He was from Maldonado, and people
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: who knew him described a man prone to violence, especially
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: toward women. In January of 2015, weeks after Lola's body
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: was found, Daniel died by suicide. Before he died, according
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: to people close to him, he told a family member
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: that he had been involved in what happened to Lola.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: The woman who employed someone connected to him reportedly heard
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: him say he would take the secret to his grave.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: He did. His body was never formally exhumed. His DNA
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: was never formally matched to the evidence from the backpack.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: The lawyers working the case did not prioritize it in
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: the years that followed. Daniel remained a name attached to
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: a confession no court ever heard, a thread that was
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: never fully pulled. By 2019, four years after the case
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: had gone cold, The prosecutor assigned to the investigation took
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: an unusual step. Jorge Baas called Angel Moreira back in
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: for questioning. Not because new physical evidence had emerged, because
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: of language. A forensic semiotician named Isabel Ledesma analyzed recordings
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: of Moreira's earlier statements and applied a detailed study of
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: non-verbal communication. The specific patterns of speech, hesitation, and response
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: that distinguished truth from deception, and a structured questioning. Her
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: conclusion was that Marira had been mendacious on the questions
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: directly related to the crime. A judge agreed. Rosana Ortega
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: processed Marira as a cause. The appeals court confirmed the ruling.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: He was convicted of concealment in February of 2023. The
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: question of what, exactly? He had concealed. and for whom
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: was not settled by the conviction the answer. When it
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: finally came, did not arrive through a witness, it did
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: not come from a confession, or a tip, or a
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: surveillance camera. It came from a geneticist sitting with a
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: data set, looking at a problem that had been sitting
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: unsolved in an evidence locker for seven years, and deciding
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: to look at it from a different angle. Her name
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: was Natalia Samba, the blood on Lola's pink backpack. and
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: on Lola's own identification document. Found inside it had been typed, profiled,
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: and entered into Uruguay's National Registry of Genetic Profiles. That
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: registry includes DNA collected from people processed through the criminal
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: system since 2014. Direct searches against that database had come
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: back negative year after year. Whoever left blood on the
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: backpack was not in the system. Zamba's approach was different.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: She did not search for the person directly. She discriminated
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: the maternal line from the unknown DNA profile, isolating the
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: specific genetic markers, passed through the mother, Tind, and ran
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: that narrow search against the database. It matched a half-brother,
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: a man already in prison for an unrelated crime. From
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: that half-brother, Investigators worked outward, along the family tree. The
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: mother at the center of that tree had 11 children
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: by three different fathers. The circle of possible contributors to
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: the maternal line profile was defined, then narrowed, name by name,
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: branch by branch. The circle closed on one person, Leonardo
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: David Sena. 39 years old, known in the area as
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: El Panadero, the baker. He had a criminal record, a
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: charge for personal injuries in 2003 and a charge for
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: sexual assault in 2009. Both predated the creation of the
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: National Registry of Genetic Profiles. His DNA had never been
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: entered into the system. On May 19th of 2020, police
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: found him working in a bakery in Chui, a town
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: on the Brazilian border, more than 300 kilometers from Barra
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: de Balizas. He refused to provide a DNA sample voluntarily.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: Investigators obtained a toothbrush from his residence. The profile extracted
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: from that toothbrush matched the blood on Lola's backpack. It
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: matched the blood on Lola's identification document. When confronted with this,
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: Senna offered an explanation. He said he had cut himself
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: on a broken bottle at a supermarket in Balizas. He
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: said he had found the backpack abandoned and picked it
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: up while bleeding from the cut. That was how his
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: blood got there. That was all. Two employees of that
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: supermarket said no such accident had occurred while they worked there.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: A severance document then surfaced, showing that Senna had stopped
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: working at that location before December of 2014. He was
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: not employed in Balizas during the week Lolo was killed.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: His only other recorded comment from custody was a request.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: He asked to be placed in a prison facility in
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: Yuraka so that his partner and children could visit him.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: He said nothing else about Lola. Prosecutor Mariela Nunez requested
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: 30 years for homicidio muy especialmente agravado, the most serious
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: category of homicide under Uruguayan law. The trial against Saina
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: was ongoing as of October of 2023. No verdict had
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: been reached. His defense attorney, Iris Ponielis, filed for nullification
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: of the evidence. The argument rested on several pillars. Alleged
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: manipulation of the blood samples, questions about the chain of
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: custody for the backpack, the towel, and the wallet, challenges
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: to the DNA analysis techniques used, and objections to the
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: software deployed by Uruguayan police in the genetic genealogy work.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: If the court accepted any part of that argument, the
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: evidence connecting Senna to the crime could be ruled inadmissible.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: The DNA would not disappear. The technique used to find
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: Sanec exists. The match exists. What remains uncertain is whether
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: a court will allow it to stand. And this is
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: where the case splits into two different kinds of unresolved.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: One is legal. A verdict still pending. A defense argument
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: still alive. A convicted accessory. Morera, who will not say
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: what he knows or what he was part of. A
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: dead man. Daniel, who reportedly confessed but whose body was
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: never tested. A crime scene where the chain of who
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: found the body and how was never cleanly established. The
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: other kind of unresolved is quieter and harder to name.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: Lola left the house on the morning of December 28th,
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: carrying a Cortaza novel and a bottle of water. She
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: told Claudia she would be back by 4.30. She was
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: 15 years old, in a beach town in summer, in
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: a place her parents trusted completely because a woman they
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: had known for 25 years had invited her there. Nothing
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: about that morning suggested danger. The forensic window places her
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: death between one and four in the afternoon, on a beach,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: in summer, in broad daylight, in a town, small enough
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: that three hundred people constituted a full house. She was
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: killed between those hours, her body hidden in the dunes,
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: and no one saw anything that pointed directly to who
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: did it, or no one said they did. The backpack
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: stayed in the sand for two weeks after her body
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: was found. It was not discovered in the original sweep.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: It appeared on January 14th in a dune near the site.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: The towel inside it was soaked with blood. Seven years
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: passed before that. Blood told anyone a name. Seven years
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: during which Lola's parents pursued every lead. attended every hearing,
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: and waited. Seven years during which Morera walked free, was re-examined, convicted, appealed,
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: and convicted again. Seven years during which Daniel's name circulated
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: in whispers, attached to a confession no one could use.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Natalia Samba did not know when she sat down with
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: that DNA profile, and decided to try the maternal line.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: she was about to close a loop that had been
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: open since 2014. She was solving a technical problem. The
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: grief it carried was someone else's to hold. What she
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: found changed the shape of the case entirely, but it
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: did not change what happened on that beach. Lola walked
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: into a December afternoon with a book and came back
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: to no one. The last confirmed image of her is
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: the one she left the house with. A pink backpack,
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: Over one shoulder. The water bottle. The agreement to return
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: by 4.30. She did not return. The door she walked
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: out of is still there. The dunes are still there.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: The trial continues. By October 2020. Three. No verdict had
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: been issued in the trial against Leonardo David Sena, the
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: man found working in a bakery near the Brazilian border,
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: whose DNA matched blood on a 15-year-old's pink backpack, still
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: had not been convicted of anything. His defense attorney, Iris Punielis,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: had filed motions to nullify nearly every piece of physical evidence,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: challenging the chain of custody for the backpack, the Tola
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: and Lola's identification documents, questioning the DNA analysis techniques and
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: the software used to process them, and alleging sample manipulation.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: Two employees had contradicted Zainer's alibi. A severance document had
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: proven he no longer worked at that supermarket in December 2014.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: None of that had yet translated into a sentence. Angel
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Eduardo Moreira, the man who said he took Vola's pulse
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: twice and felt nothing, had been convicted in February 2023.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: but only for concealment. The appeals court confirmed that conviction unanimously.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: He spent years insisting he simply found the dying girl
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: and walked away. A forensic semiotician analyzed his language patterns
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: and concluded he was lying. The court agreed. What exactly
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: he was concealing, and for whom, remained a question the
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: verdict did not fully answer. There was still Daniel, known
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: as El Terezo. who died by suicide in January 2015,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: weeks after Lola's body was found. People who knew him
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: said he had told a family member he was responsible.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: His employer reportedly heard him say he would take the
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: secret to his grave. No exhumation had been ordered. No
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: formal DNA comparison had been made. His body stayed in
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: the ground with whatever it knew. Adriana and Diego Chomales
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: had spent nine years watching investigators chase a profile that
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: returned no match, watching a man get convicted for helping
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: cover something up without anyone being convicted for the thing itself,
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: and watching the only lead that finally moved the case
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: forward emerge not from a confession or a witness, but
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: from a geneticist following a maternal bloodline through eleven children
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: across three fathers, until it narrowed to one name. Florencia.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: Lola's sister had grown up in the years since December 2014.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: Lola was going to be 15 forever. The New York
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: trip that had been planned for January 2015 never happened.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: What is hardest to hold onto after everything is the
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: simplest part of the story. On the morning of December 28th, 2014,
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: Lola Chomnales left her house in a small beach town,
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: carrying a pink backpack, a Julio Cortázar novel, a water bottle,
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: and about $ 50. She had left her phone behind because
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: there was no signal. She had agreed to be back
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: by 4.30 in the afternoon. She was 15 years old,
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: and she had been in Bar de Balizas for two days.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: She never came back. The case that followed lasted almost
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: a decade. crossed two countries, survived the suicide of one suspect,
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: the acquittal, and later, conviction of another, and eventually required
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: a geneticist to trace a bloodline through a family tree
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: no one had thought to map. The DNA that finally
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: pointed to Leonardo Sena was not found in a database
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: under his name. It was found through a half-brother already
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: in prison for something else entirely. Natalia Samba isolated the
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: maternal line from an unmatched profile and followed it to
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: its source. There is something about that pink backpack that
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: keeps returning. It was found two weeks after Lola's body,
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: half buried in a dune not far from where she died. Inside,
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: the tala, Omnitala. Blood. That blood sat in an evidence
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: room for years, while every direct search of the DNA
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: registry came back empty. The answer was always there. The
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: technique to find it just did not exist yet. As
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: of October 2023, Leonardo Sena's trial was still ongoing. He
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: had said almost nothing since his arrest. His one request
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: was that he be held in a prison near Rocha,
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: so his partner and children could visit. Lola Luna Chomanalis.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: Belmonte would have turned 25 in November 2024. This show
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: is made by Oba Media.