Copyright The New York Times
Pilar Tomàs stepped outside her stone house and walked toward the scene of a crime that has for 30 years haunted Tor, Spain, a tiny, mist-shrouded village of 13 houses high up in the Pyrenees. “They found him there,” she said, pointing through a cold rain at another stone house a few yards away. The unsolved killing of Josep Montané, 70, known here as Sansa, was the third in Tor in 15 years. The killing, in 1995, and its details — an electric cable around the neck, a decomposed body and a back story involving smugglers and murky business deals with a neighboring ski resort — attracted a young television reporter who in 1997 aired an investigation on a Catalan television station. He stuck with the story, writing a book in 2005, releasing a smash hit podcast in 2018 and airing a wildly popular true-crime documentary series last year. The few residents of Tor, an idyllic Catalan town where brown cows stroll along streams in the mountains’ shadows, have become reluctant characters in the case, their stone houses a macabre set for Spain’s “Only Murders in the Village.” The neighbors used to get along. In 1896, the heads of 13 families declared joint ownership of the Tor mountain, one of the highest points in the Pyrenees range and the strategic last stop on the Spanish border before the tiny principality and tax haven of Andorra. They stipulated that only year-round residents who kept their homes’ hearths lit could claim ownership. But the greatest source of tension in the mountain village remained the mountain itself. Sansa envisioned a lucrative ski resort on his slopes and had entered into talks with Andorran skiing interests. His main rival, known locally as El Palanca, wanted to keep the mountain a bucolic paradise, with grazing cows and horses. A decade of bad blood and lawsuits culminated in a judge’s decision in 1995 to declare Sansa the mountain’s sole owner. Five months later, he was either bludgeoned or strangled, but he was almost certainly dragged into his kitchen after the fact. Investigators complained it was too filthy to find clues. “The problem is everyone wanted to kill Sansa, everyone can be the killer,” said Carles Porta, the journalist behind the Tor projects. He fell in love with Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” as a young reporter and said he found his Holcomb, Kan., in the “middle of nowhere” in Catalonia. Early on, he passed his summer vacations with his not-thrilled wife and children while he investigated. “Probably I started true crime in Spain with Tor,” he said. Merce Turallols, 38, who works at the Hostal Montaña, her family’s hotel in Tor, was 8 when Sansa’s body was found. She recalled that the police seemed more interested in the food served by her aunt, Ms. Tomàs, known to Tor aficionados as Pili, than in solving the crime. Ms. Turallols acknowledged that “true-crime tourism” had helped the family hotel, but said that those living in the village couldn’t take it anymore. In this past summer’s high true-crime season, she said, there was nowhere even to park, and eccentrics took over. “One Freaky came with a rope tied around his neck,” she said. Now, with summer over, the tourists, at least, have vanished. “Welcome to Tor,” Antonio Zamorano, 38, a local tour guide, said recently as his jeep made way for a suspicious car with foreign plates and a flat tire on the narrow mountain road. He said the unguarded border road, surrounded by pine trees and by beech trees turning yellow and red, was a smuggling thoroughfare. He also pointed out herbs that locals believe end unwanted pregnancies, horses that would be chopped up for meat and grim landmarks. “This is the place where they dragged the body,” he said in what was Sansa’s yard. “In this house, a hippie killed himself,” he said up the road, adding to the town’s death toll. A fifth death, from a mysterious fall, “is here on the left.” Farther up above the town, he pointed out a blue Citroën Saxo abandoned by smugglers in the middle of a field. By a boulder tagged, “Private Mountain of Tor,” he offered a variety of theories on Sansa’s killing, called one frigid slope a training ground for Spanish terrorists and looked with deep appreciation at the cows and muddy field around him. “Magic mushrooms,” he said. Joan Clotet, 60, an executive from the ski resort that had been in business with Sansa, said Tor had missed a great opportunity because the locals could never agree on anything. Any lingering hope for a resort was gone, he said, “because of the murder.” But the killing had at least generated a cottage industry for Mr. Porta, who is in Barcelona shooting a different true-crime investigation for Disney about abandoned children. He said that after years of cashiers and taxi drivers asking him, “Who killed Sansa?” he thought new clues pointed to a hit man who, he said, was “living in Miami.” He intended to take more reporting trips there for what he thought could be a fiction series or even a movie. “It’s infinite,” Mr. Porta said. Asked if his wife might at least appreciate summer trips to Florida more than to Tor, he said that they had separated more than a decade ago. “She was fed up with me.” In Tor, locals are also a little fed up with Mr. Porta’s projects. Ms. Tomàs wondered if he could donate some of his profits to the town so that it could get a cellphone tower. She said she’d gladly give up the exponential increase in customers, and even the profits she made from her own Tor merch, for a return to normalcy. That wouldn’t happen until Mr. Porta found the killer, though, she said, because “people need an ending.” But as she walked from Sansa’s stone house past soaked and sleeping dogs, she said the crime would never be solved. When it came to Sansa’s killer, she said, she was sure of only one thing. “It’s not me!”
