Romain, Erasmus student disappeared in Barcelona: his last call 200 meters from a sexual predator

On September 7, 2007, he got off the train. Before her eyes, Barcelona. The time had come, at last. Gone was Lampaul-Guimiliau (Brittany, France). Ahead, an exciting course: “it is a very important year for my studies, mom.” Romain Lannuzel, about to turn 20, arrived in Spain accompanied by his friend Renaud. Both were part of the Erasmus program. He was going to study 3rd year of English Philology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona: “I am very happy”.

He socialized, made friends and enjoyed himself, but his dream came to an end two months later. Romain He disappeared on November 13 of that same year. Without prior notice, without more. A call at the Provença metro station is the last thing you have of him. Almost 16 years later, Romain is gone.

The investigation began a week later. It stuck. There were and are not new clues. There are no answers. There is nowhere to shoot. In the mind of Mireille, her mother, a photo: found in 2012 at the home of a sexual predator convicted of drugging, raping and murdering another 20-year-old student who had recently arrived in Barcelona. “There were thousands of photos in his house, we saw about 90, all of victims, one of them was my son Romain.”

balmes street

“He disappeared on Tuesday, November 13, 2007,” Mireille backs down. “I have been asking the same questions for fifteen and a half years: where is she, what happened …”. She has learned Spanish so she can speak directly with the researchers, the Mossos d’Esquadraalthough with OPEN CASE, in order not to miss out on details, he prefers to narrate it in French.

“I received an email from him the day before, Monday. He told me that he had an exam the next day,” the woman revives. Subject: US History, I’d do well. “He also told me that he, like his friend Renaud, He wanted to move from Barcelona, ​​from Sants, where he shared a flat, to Sabadell. I wanted to be closer to the university to gain at least half an hour, or even three-quarters of an hour, on the way. On Monday he spent the night in Sabadell, he went to the exam and, when finished, he would go to his old apartment to collect some of his belongings. A computer monitor, some clothes and a badminton racket. It didn’t come.

He recharged his cell phone and told his former roommates: “I’ll be here in an hour and a half.” Her call would be made at the door of the Provença metro station, as confirmed by the investigation. “There, in Balmes street, in the center of Barcelona, ​​Romain’s trail was lost.“.

Station in Sants

“It was a little weird that he didn’t write to me, but since he was moving, I thought he didn’t have internet.” The alert jumped late, regrets her mother. The same thing happened to his friends, “those from Sabadell located him in Sants, those from Sants in Sabadell”.

A week later, with all the alarms on, his family landed in Barcelona. They tried to reconstruct their steps, they all ended at the station. “The problem is that the cameras no longer speak after four days, so we couldn’t see them when we arrived. I think maybe they would have helped us find him.”

With no thread to pull from, with the phone turned off, the first posters were printed: Erasmus disappeared in Barcelona. He is 1.85m tall. Brown, blue eyes. He was wearing a black jacket, with a hat of the same color and dark shoes. We ask for your collaboration.

Los Mossos d’Esquadrathe French Ministry of the Interior and the French gendarmerie joined forces. They ran into the absence of indications, of evidence. “Silence. Nothing, empty… It was incredible, where was Romain?” The voluntary march was visualized, “it was and is impossible, Romain was happy”, defended and defends Mireille.

He loved living in Barcelona, ​​he liked the city. “He also liked interacting with foreign students because he was curious, he was interested in history, learning about other cultures.” He questioned his friends. No one knew why, how, or with whom.

A graphologist analyzed the handwriting in his exam, done hours before it disappeared: he was not upset, nervous. Romaine was fine. “Besides,” recalls his mother, he had plans: “he had just bought his plane ticket to spend the Christmas holidays with us in Brittany and, above all, to celebrate his 20th birthday here, with his childhood friends. He had called me to tell me how glad she was to see us again soon.”

French researchers traveled to Barcelona. Catalan researchers flew to Brittany as well. Everything went black. There was no thread to pulluntil five years later he died Crispin Scott, a young 20-year-old student, American, recently arrived in Barcelona. He looked like he overdosed. Product of a crazy night and a fatal -lethal- mix of drugs and alcohol. The reality was known with his autopsy: he was murdered. He was the victim of Óscar Vicente Castro Cedeño, a 41-year-old Ecuadorian poet and photographer, who in 2014 was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Mireille, already at home, received a call from the French private investigators who, out of desperation, hired to join forces in the search for Romain. They told him about Castro’s arrest, about the death of the 20-year-old foreigner in Barcelona. “Immediately, (Jean-François Abgrall and Sandrine Wattecamps) reconstructed the footsteps of this delinquent, to see if he could have crossed paths with Romain”.

They found that “in 2007, At the time of my son’s disappearance, he worked in a restaurant in the Sants neighborhood, he was a member of the Castellers de Sants… Romain lived on Carrer de Sants”. The predator also “lived 200 meters from the place where my son made his last phone call”.

At the subway exit

French inquiries revealed “other cases of disappearances of young men in Barcelona. They had even buried and found three corpses without the authorities identifying them“. They requested that their DNA be compared with that of Romain. It was negative.

From France, they drew up a profile of the criminal. “The suspect spoke French and was part of a collective of artists from Sants where he gave poetry recitals, accompanied by the guitar… Romain’s interests“. The Mossos report, along the same lines, included that the predator had a double life: by day he took care of elderly ladies and encouraged poetry with literary gatherings. At night, he abused young boys, whom he previously drugged. Sick with HIV, he never used protection and, at least one of them -Crispin-, he killed.

After his arrest, the man “explained that He approached his victims in student neighborhoods, at the exit of nightclubs or subway stations. My son Romain disappeared at the exit of a metro station.” Castro confessed in the trial held against him: “I came (to Spain) to hunt young people in his twenties, students, of foreign origin, fair skinned and athletic build”.

2,000 photos of naked young people

Crispin Scott was drugged, raped and murdered and, previously, had been photographed during the abuse. His was not an isolated case. The Mossos d’Esquadra found some two thousand photographs in the murderer’s house, some on computer support, others even printed on paper. They all followed the same pattern: the victim clothed, the victim naked from the waist down, the victim naked from the waist up. Each series ended with an image of sexual assault.

“We learned that the police discovered those photos and we asked to see them.” In April, Romain’s family sat in front of the images. “They presented us with photos of 90 young people, different victims. They were young, partially or totally naked, inert, asleep, drugged or dead? How do you know…”, laments Mireille, “Much to our dismay, in one of the photos, there was Romain!”

Horror set in. “Time passed… Nobody said anything,” she laments. “So we called the police. They told us that we, Romain’s mother and father, had made a mistake in examining the photos“. The message shocked them, they thought they would be investigating what happened to Romain. “No. They said it wasn’t him… But yes.and his parents no longer know how to recognize our son…“.

“It was not,” they said, “because a physiognomy expert estimated that the size of the bones of the victim in the photo did not correspond to that of Romain.” They did not know more.

Since that viewing, 11 years have passed, almost 16 since Romain disappeared. Spain, Australia and New Caledonia. Mireille has traveled thousands of kilometers traveling around the world after hearing ‘clues’ in which they assured that her son was there: “it was never him”.

Related news

Romain, the bohemian, cheerful young man who loves languages ​​(he was in his third year of Chinese) is still not there. “Beyond the disappearance of Romain, We also fight so that the other victims of this sexual predator who is finally in prison are identified and their families also stop suffering. Who are they?”.

His son never came home. The plane ticket he bought was never used. “They told us that the best thing was to mourn.” Mireille refuses: “I will not stop looking, I will never stop.”