On 19 May 1928, eight children and two women were murdered in La Pobla de Ferran, a village in the municipality of Passanant, located in La Conca de Barberà. The documentation preserved in the archives allows us to reconstruct how that monstrous crime was perpetrated.
In May, as the harvest season approached, the fields were a hive of activity. This was especially true in that year of generous rains which had nourished the crops. Before June, it was time to clear the weeds, a task that mobilised the small village of only 42 inhabitants. Only children, some women, and those unable to work had stayed behind. That is why, when gunshots were heard in the mid-afternoon, everyone ran to see what was happening.
Even in the worst of nightmares, the first men to arrive could not have imagined the scenes of death and violence they found. On the village’s single street lay the wounded bodies of Marina, 20, and Antònia, 28, both shot in the face and other parts of their bodies. A little further up, an elderly woman and her granddaughter had survived by a miracle. But where were the rest of the children? They were nowhere. No matter how much they called their names, they did not respond. It was only when someone entered one of the barns at the end of the village that the horrific truth became clear.
Covered with straw were the corpses of six children. Girls and boys ranging from three to four years old for the youngest and eight to eleven for the oldest. All had been killed in the same manner: their heads crushed with an axe and the butt of a shotgun. These were not the only victims. In one house, a mother and her young daughter were found dead on the entryway landing. A little further on, the body of an elderly neighbour, seventy years old, was discovered, shot while feeding the animals. Despite their injuries, the survivors recounted how they had been able to identify the person responsible for all this carnage.
It was Josep Marimon Carles, a twenty-six-year-old man, short, odd-looking, lame, and with a hunchback caused by a form of tuberculosis known as Pott’s disease, which had affected his bones and deformed his spine. For a long time, pain and frustration at being unable to work had consumed him, and he spent his days lying on a mattress at the entrance of his home. Neighbours told him to shake off his lethargy, to stop loafing about, that there was work to do in the fields… but he never moved. No one had ever suspected he was capable of committing such a horrific act. And the worst part: after staining La Pobla de Ferran with blood and pain, he vanished without a trace.
The authorities were immediately alerted, prompting a massive mobilisation. Local militias were called in from nearby villages, and the Guardia Civil police force dispatched an entire company from Montblanc. Two thousand men began searching for the murderer everywhere as news of the crime spread like wildfire. First throughout the county, then to Tarragona, and finally across Catalonia. Newspapers were filled with reports. And journalists from Barcelona and Madrid arrived in La Pobla de Ferran to cover the story. Even the prestigious English newspaper The Times mentioned it.
Meanwhile, days passed and Marimon remained at large. Panic gripped the local population. In the surrounding villages, parents kept their children indoors. In Montblanc, classes were suspended and the school was closed until the criminal was found. Everywhere, rumours circulated of people claiming to have seen him. In Reus, Barcelona, and other towns, some even asserted they had identified the perpetrator of the massacre.
In fact, he was hiding just on the outskirts of the village, in a charcoal-maker’s hut in a hard-to-reach area, surviving on the small amount of food and wine he had taken before fleeing. Finally, after a week on the run, on Sunday 27 May at seven in the morning, the head of the militia from Pira found him as he emerged from his hiding place. When ordered to stop, the killer tried to grab his shotgun. Without hesitation, the head of the militia fired. The bullet entered through his left eye, killing him instantly.
The nightmare ended for a county that had lived in fear for seven days, but the episode left an indelible mark on everyone who experienced it. So much so that many inhabitants of La Pobla de Ferran and the neighbouring village of Passanant left to try to forget everything and start a new life far from the scene of the monstrous crime.
Thanks to the survivors, the events could be reconstructed. Marimon had deceived the children, telling them to accompany him to hunt pigeons, as he had done many times before, in order to lead them to the barn. Once there, he murdered them with indescribable violence and rage.
What drove this twenty-six-year-old to kill nearly all the children in his village has never been determined. Those who wish to investigate further can consult the documents that record these events. They are preserved at the La Conca de Barberà Regional Archive.
