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[sp-truecrime]

MISSING: Juan Pedro Martínez

Juan Pedro Martínez Gómez was 10 years old, and lived in Murcia (Spain). He was very loved by his family and friends and was a great student. So much that thanks to his excellent grades his parents decided to take him on a roadtrip from Murcia to Bilbao (roughly 7 hours) on June 26th 1986, since his father worked as a truck driver and drove a tanker truck full of sulfuric acid.

But they wouldn’t reach Bilbao. Aproximately 4 hours into their journey, around Somosierra mountains, the truck began speeding and driving erratically and ended up overturning and causing both adults’ deaths. 

The plot twist came when police cleared the scene and notified Juan Pedro’s grandmother and she asked about her grandson. Police were startled: Juan Pedro, dead or alive, was nowhere to be found. 

At first, police thought Juan Pedro’s body could’ve been dissolved in the sulfuric acid the truck carried, but quickly dismissed that possibility due to lack of proof of any human remains. Also, a body had to be at least two days in sulfuric acid for it to be completely gone. They also thought maybe his grandmother was wrong and Juan Pedro never got into the truck but an eyewitness placed him, with both his parents, on a road stop near where the accident had happened.

Juan Pedro was officially declared missing a few weeks into the investigation. A nation-wide search for him began and multiple eyewitness, whether reliable or not, started tipping the police into the possibility of a kidnapping. 

However, a few tips stood out to police. Many eyewitnesses claimed that two women and a man driving a wagon stopped their car beside the truck and took the child way. A year later, in 1987, a local man in Madrid (about half an hour from where the accident took place) claimed that an old woman with a disoriented child had asked him for directions to the US embassy. He was certain that child was Juan Pedro. His description of the woman also matched the one eyewitnesses had given about one of the women in the wagon. Nevertheless, this woman was never found.

Many eyewitnesses claimed that they weren’t two women a man those who had taken the child from the truck but nordic-looking all-white-wearing masked figures. They said these figures were very tall and slim, and some even identified them as aliens.

The same year, after an intense search of the tanker truck, police found cocaine hidden in the cabin. When relatives of the family were asked, they confirmed Juan Pedro’s dad, Andrés, was involved in drugs against his will and had some issues with the mafia. Police then came with the lead theory that still persists today: Juan Pedro was kidnapped by the mafia on a road stop before the truck had the accident and that’s why his father started speeding and driving erratically and ended up causing the truck to overturn on the road.

33 years later, Juan Pedro's whereabouts are still unknown and no corpse or DNA traces have ever been found. Interpol has declared this case “the strangest missing case in all of Europe”.