Torn Dreams: A series dedicated to the families that have been separated by unfortunate circumstances; who are the inspiration of this project, and to the victims who will never be forgotten.
A «wait for me», that the young María Teresa Fernández Martín wrote by text message to her boyfriend, will turn 18 years of its emission, equaling the life time that it had at the moment of disappearing on August 18, 2000, in the frame of the patron festivities of Motril, Spain.
Her father, Antonio Fernández, never imagined that the last meeting with Mari Tere would be when he had to move her in his car to Andalucía Av. at 9:30 p.m., near a bus stop, where the girl had planned to finally meet her lover, her sister and some friends at a concert, but… that never happened. It’s known that they saw her at approximately 9:50 p.m. while she still was at the bus stop.
From then on, the Fernández Martín case became distorted and lost nuances of certainty, forcing the authorities to resort to intuition and generating desperate search attempts by the family members, friends and even strangers driven by empathy: they distributed photos throught different cities, offered rewards to anyone who gave reliable testimonies and organized rallies.
Thus, calls, messages and anonymous letters didn’t wait and created new paths of investigation without success, including, in 2004, the great testimonial disappointment of Tony Alexander King, an unstable British homicide condemned by the death of two young girls, against his own «Colleague» Robert Graham.
A recent interview with the criminologist Vicente Garrido revealed important aspects of Maria Teresa's personality: very sociable and a horses friend since she was a child, she could have made malicious associates through equestrian tastes behind her parents backs, probably deceived by people who knew how to gain her trust quickly and disguised, because the batch of questions designed by the expert revealed clear features of a passion crime. For Garrido, Fernández Martín was raped and later murdered.
In 2015, Antonio Fernández approved the making of his daughter's death certificate, arguing that it wasn’t a sign of defeat, but a decision he made to benefit his other two descendants in a hypothetical process of designation of inherited assets.
In spite of the eighteen years of restlessness and the discouraging opinion of the specialists, the family continues to cling to the hope of seeing María Teresa, who would now be a 36-year-old woman with a history as frightening as it’s reflective as background.