Sunday, January 8, 2023 | 2:30 p.m.
In October 2003, the Criminal Court I of Posadas sentenced Marcelo Fabián Owczarczyn and Juan Eduardo Bruno to life imprisonment for the brutal murder of Rosa Wroblevski de Duarte (74), an act perpetrated in December 2001 in Azara.
This is one of the most notorious crimes in the history of the aforementioned missionary town, since the victim was retired from the Registry of Persons and known with the affectionate nickname of “Azara’s mother” for the number of newborns she registered. .
Those involved were sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence that at that time included 25 years behind bars, an amount that later – due to the modification of the Penal Code – was raised to 35 years.
Consequently, although they will only serve their sentences at the end of 2026, in the middle of last year the TP Uno de Posadas granted them both parole.
Bruno left Loreto prison on April 29, 2022, while Owczarczyn left Oberá Penal Unit II on June 15.
In the respective documents, the acting Court ordered “strict control” of the convicted by the Board of Released and Graduates of the Province of Misiones until the completion of the sentence, scheduled for within three years.
Obtaining the benefit of probation was based on the good conduct they exhibited during the years of confinement, as well as psychological and socio-environmental reports. No problems were reported due to the previous transitory departures either.
Meanwhile, as is protocol, they must have a legal address and appear before the judicial authority whenever required.
The crime
Between the night of December 28 and the early morning of December 29, 2001, Rosa Wroblevski de Duarte was beaten and then strangled, according to the autopsy.
The criminals searched the entire house in search of the victim’s assets. Thus, they seized around a thousand pesos in cash (then a considerable sum) and various jewelry.
A couple of days later they went on vacation to Mar del Plata, where they were finally found by the Police while they were walking along the pedestrian street.
In the investigation of the case, it was determined that Owczarczyn and Bruno were a couple, as they recognized before a professional from the Forensic Medical Corps who testified at trial.
Both were sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime of double qualified homicide for treachery and to hide another crime.
Judges Ángel Dejesús Cardozo, Martín Errecaborde and Demetria González de Cantero ruled in line with the prosecutor Liliana Picazo, who exposed in her plea the treachery with which they killed the victim so that she would not report them for the theft of the savings she kept.
It was established that the retiree knew Marcelo Owczarczyn because she was a friend of her grandmother.
Although there were no witnesses to the event, the contribution of the town’s residents and a series of expertise allowed us to reconstruct that, prior to the crime, Wroblevski traveled to a bank in Apóstoles to collect his retirement.
The prosecutor considered that the murderers attacked the victim in the kitchen and took the body to the bedroom. Proof of this were the injuries that forensics found on the arms, added to the blows to the head and hanging marks around the neck.
Tests
As reconstructed by chronicles of the trial, Picazo stressed that Owczarczyn played a key role in the fact that the victim had confidence in him, which clearly facilitated entry into the house.
But beyond that, the head of the public prosecutor’s office emphasized a detail that showed the cold blood of the accused.
In this sense, he said that before escaping to Mar del Plata with the stolen money, the defendant went to the town police station and told the chief of the guard that he was concerned about what had happened to the pensioner -whose crime had already transcended-, since he was traveling for a few days and his grandmother would be left alone.
Undoubtedly, an action typical of a manipulative personality, as described by a psychiatrist in the oral trial.
For their part, several witnesses testified that the day before the murder they saw the defendants hitchhiking on the road, from which they inferred that they had no money.
But a day later they were seen waiting for a bus to travel to Posadas, where it was later learned that they sold the stolen jewelry.
In this regard, one day before boarding the bus that would take them to Mar del Plata, they took a remís and the driver saw that the wallet of one of them was full of bills, according to what he declared.
One manipulative, another submissive
Lilian Belloni, Owczarczyn’s defense attorney, stated that the defendant’s intention was to steal and not kill, for which she asked that he be sentenced for the crime of homicide on the occasion of robbery.
For her part, Bruno’s defender, Ana Amiel, also separated her client from the murder, since according to her point of view there was no concrete evidence to link him. Prior to the conviction, only Owczarczyn rehearsed an apology and reiterated that he had nothing to do with the murder because he only went to steal.
As a counterpart, in the oral debate it was concluded that the couple acted with premeditation. One of them carried a large scarf, with which they strangled the retiree.
For the judges, Owczarczyn held the victim by the neck and Bruno immobilized her. Then they dragged her to the room, where the next morning she was found by relatives. They also determined that the former took advantage of the fact that Rosa Wroblevski was a friend of his grandmother’s, trusted him and this facilitated his access to the house.
The motive for the crime would have been none other than obtaining money to go on vacation to Mar del Plata, which they did, although on the way they left a trail of evidence that incriminated them.
In her report, the Forensic Medical Corps psychiatrist Norma Lapunte de Acosta revealed that both admitted to being homosexual and that they were a couple at the time of the crime.
Furthermore, she called Owczarczyn “manipulative, very contrived and fond of using seduction to engage with others”.
On the other hand, he classified Bruno as “submissive and dependent. He also added that he did what his concubine wanted to satisfy him and to feel good himself.”
Owczarczyn’s high profile
The name of Marcelo Fabián Owczarczyn appeared several times in the media for different events, such as a remembered escape from the Posadas Third Section and his marriage to a transgender woman in 2012.
The escape was recorded in mid-July 2003, before being sentenced. Owczarczyn even left a letter addressed to Justice, in which he explained that he made the decision to leave because his rights were not respected. Days later, Owczarczyn was arrested in Azara, where he tried to take refuge in his grandmother’s house.
Almost a decade later, his name returned to the media because he was the protagonist of the first same-sex marriage in the country’s prison context. He was in the Penal Unit II of Oberá. He married a trans woman with a college education and no criminal record.
Those close to the marriage confirmed that they are currently separated.
