Few hours were missing for one of the homicides that most shocked Catalan public opinion to prescribe without solving. The case of Helena Jubany, the young librarian from Sabadell found dead in strange circumstances, was going to be closed definitively due to lack of evidence to incriminate the main suspects. Just twenty years after the crime was committed and just moments before the deadline for accepting new evidence expired, technology managed to break into the crime scene to help put together a huge puzzle with hundreds of complex pieces.
A new computer forensic expert urged the investigating judge to commission the National Police Corps to carry out a handwriting test to determine if the author of the anonymous notes that Jubany received before he died is the same person who directed the emails recently found on the hard drive of the victim. And all this, due to the similarity of arguments used, both in the handwritten notes and in the emails. After the graphological analysis, Francesc Xavier JM, a former member of the Unió Excursionista de Sabadell, will be called to testify as a suspect on April 1.
The personal computer, a key piece in the life and death of Helena Jubany
Helena Jubany in an image from the family album
Helena Jubany was a technologically advanced 27-year-old for those times. Despite the primacy of the operating systems, the basic computer programs and the performance of the computers of the time; the recovery of her computer’s hard drive has been key and has given the victim’s relatives hope of finding justice.
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The full content of what Jubany stored and managed through his personal computer reached our days thanks to a digital copy that a computer friend suggested to Helena’s brother. A kind of guarantee that would allow all the information that the young woman managed through her PC to be saved over time. A kind of premonition that, with the development of technology, the improvement of data recovery techniques and the preparation of forensic computer experts, has allowed us to provide valuable information for a case that is already closer to being resolved.
20 years ago, with the capabilities that the police had, the intervention was reasonable, but then nobody thought of looking for the evidence that is not seen
Shortly after his death and after learning of the threats the victim received on the Internet, the police investigated the computer equipment between 2001 and 2002 without finding conclusive evidence. “Twenty years ago, with the capabilities that the police had, the intervention that was carried out on Helena’s computer was reasonable. The visible evidence was extracted and if it came, it was added to the case, but then no one thought of looking for the evidence that cannot be seen,” says Bruno Pérez Juncà, the forensic computer expert who has managed to reveal the new digital evidence in the case.
Bruno Pérez Juncà in a moment of his speech in Pamplona Negra
Two decades later, computer science has developed methods and tools for extracting that information consulted through web pages. Of those emails that are not downloaded through a manager, but through the HTML language, as well as participation in old chats and forums that -a priori- seem not to leave any trace on a computer. And Pérez Juncà has used this, so that much later he could access the reading of the electronic correspondence that allegedly links and betrays one of the accused. An arduous task that “was not easy at all” for the professional. “Every time we access a web page, it is downloaded to our device and stored in temporary files that are unknown to a normal user and that is where those of us who dedicate ourselves to this end up arriving,” details the computer forensic.
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“I took the disk and analyzed it to find out what was there, what was not there and to obtain all the activity that the computer had, at what time it was connected, how many times it was connected, what was written, what was not written, what was consulted and what He didn’t consult,” he says. “The job of a forensic is to extract from the computer even those pieces of text that are written and that are not sent because they are deleted by the user,” he adds.
From then on, the work fell exclusively on the victim’s relatives, who had to assimilate the information that Pérez Juncà carefully extracted from the team. “My expert asked the judge that all the information contained in the girl’s equipment be taken into account by the investigators so that they could complete the process and cross-reference the data with that obtained in interrogations and others.”
I analyzed the disk to find out what was there, what wasn’t there, at what time it was connected, how many times it was connected, what was written, what wasn’t written and what was consulted
From the copy of the hard drive that the Jubany family kept, the forensic computer expert had to recreate a system that was capable of integrating with data stored with technology from the last century. Still, Helena Jubany’s Windows 98 was up and running again. “We were able to see what wallpaper Helena had on her PC, the folders that occupied her work area and the methodology that she used when saving her documents,” says the expert.
But beyond the appearance of the computer, what was interesting was hidden in some visible files; although “those who were not seen were the decisive ones”, Pérez Juncà emphasizes. This is all the information that Jubany accessed through portals such as the University manager, web mail or chat pages through which users of the time communicated and interacted with each other.
Resurrect the victim’s computer
The computer forensic expert managed to recover the contents of Helena’s hard drive. In the picture, what his desk looked like
The investigation of the case reveals that the chemical substance deposited in the drinks that accompanied the anonymous notes was the one that was found in the lifeless body of the victim and the same that the police found, in large doses stored, in the apartment of the person who today He is the new one investigated in the Jubany case.
Bruno Pérez Juncà is a computer forensic expert who has intervened in the murder case of Helena Jubany at the request of the victim’s family. Once the necessary information to expand the case has been obtained, Pérez Juncà uses this example to demonstrate the importance of technology and its complicity in solving cases. He did it in the informative framework of the Pamplona Negra festival in the capital of Navarra, where the images that accompany this video come from.
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