Five years on, the Anna and Olivia case still haunts the Canary Islands

A disappearance that shook the islands

Anna and her sister Olivia vanished in Tenerife on 27 April 2021, after spending a few hours with their father, Tomás Gimeno, who was in the process of separating from the girls’ mother, Beatriz Zimmerman. She would never see her little ones alive again.

Five years on, the case remains seared into the collective memory of the Canary Islands. It was a disappearance that not only revealed a crime of extreme cruelty but also forced public authorities and Spanish society as a whole to confront the reality of vicarious violence.

The night it all unravelled

It was a Tuesday, and it should have passed like any other Tuesday, but Tomás Gimeno had premeditated a crime that would mark that date in red on the calendar. He spent the afternoon with his daughters, first at the home of the paternal grandparents in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and then at a house in Igueste de Candelaria where the family had once lived together. Gimeno was supposed to return the girls to their mother before nightfall, but he kept putting it off with excuses, until eventually he told her to come to the house because he was going to pick up some paintings. But when the mother arrived, there was no trace of Gimeno or the girls.

The subsequent investigation placed the murder of the little ones at that home, between 7.47pm and 9pm. Beatriz tried to speak to Tomás to find out where he was. The girls’ mother thought something must have happened for them not to be at the house, but she never imagined the outcome until Gimeno called Beatriz to tell her that she would “never see the girls again”.

The reconstruction carried out during the police investigation for the judicial proceedings concluded that Gimeno had devised a plan to “cause the mother the greatest possible harm”.

The boat and the bags in the sea

The trail of Gimeno quickly led to the Marina Tenerife, where he kept his boat, El Esquilón. According to the investigation’s timeline, he arrived at the port at 9.27pm and made several trips from his car to the sports boat, carrying several bundles, until he set sail at 9.40pm.

Once he was a certain distance from land, Gimeno threw two bags into the sea. According to the investigation, these contained the bodies of the girls. The bags would appear days later, tied to an anchor, attached to a chain and a rope.

Gimeno returned to land almost an hour later. At 10.44pm, his phone battery died. At the mouth of the marina, he crossed paths with a Civil Guard vessel, whose officers issued a proposed fine for breaching the curfew. Back at the marina, he went to the security guard’s office and asked if he had a phone charger, but the security employee said he did not. Gimeno got into his car and bought a charger, cigarettes and a bottle of water at a nearby petrol station. Back at the port, he plugged his phone in at the security booth.

At 12.27am, now on 28 April, Gimeno set sail again and was never seen again. He turned on his phone and contacted his current partner and Beatriz several times until there were no more calls or replies.

The search that gripped the nation

At daybreak, several neighbours reported a sports boat, empty and adrift, off the coast of Puertito de Güímar. The hypothesis that the father had fled with the girls and could have them hidden somewhere remained open, although evidence was mounting that pushed the search towards the sea. As the hours passed with no news of Gimeno or the girls, that line of investigation pointing to the sea became the priority.

Specialist units with land, sea and air resources searched Tenerife and its coastline daily. On 29 April, a child’s car seat surfaced, which the girls’ mother recognised as the one they used to strap them in. The discovery of bloodstains on the boat was made public. The following day, 30 April, the Civil Guard searched Tomás Gimeno’s home in Igueste de Candelaria.

While investigators worked, the family needed to maintain contact with the public through a channel, while also requiring someone to take on legal representation before the court handling the investigation. Joaquín Amills, president of SOS Desaparecidos (SOS Missing Persons), acted as Beatriz Zimmermann’s spokesperson with the media and on social networks, while lawyer José Manuel Niederleytner handled her legal representation before the courts. In the early weeks, Amills maintained before the public the possibility that the girls were still alive. Beatriz Zimmermann also spoke from hope on social media for weeks.

A mother’s plea and the deep-sea search

On 20 May 2021, she published an open letter to the girls’ father, begging him to return with them and not to prolong the suffering: “Don’t drag out this torture”; “they love us and need us both”.

When the search had already been going on for a month, the oceanographic vessel Ángeles Alvariño, from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, joined the operation. The vessel worked with sonar and the unmanned robot Liropus 2000, capable of operating at great depths and recording images of the seabed. The day-to-day operation was slow and disheartening. The difficulty lay not only in the depth but also in the seabed’s topography: ravines, crevices, irregularities and currents that made any location extremely challenging.

The Ángeles Alvariño mapped around 250 square kilometres and carried out 392 hours of filming at depths of approximately 100 to 2,000 metres. At first, the searches were completely blind. The Civil Guard’s Operational Technical Support Group worked on the signal from Tomás Gimeno’s phone to narrow down his final movements. This work made it possible to reduce the search area and direct the underwater search towards specific points.

The discovery of Olivia

On 8 June, objects linked to Gimeno were located: a duvet cover and a diving bottle, at a depth of around 1,000 metres. Just when hopes of finding any further clues had almost run out, these finds allowed the Alvariño‘s work to continue. And two days later, on 10 June, the horror was confirmed: the robot located Olivia’s body in a bag weighed down with the anchor. Next to it appeared another bag, open and empty. It is suspected that Anna’s body must have been inside, but it has never been found.

On 13 June 2021, Beatriz published a letter of thanks and grief in which she asked that her daughters’ deaths not be reduced to horror. “I want the deaths of Anna and Olivia not to have been in vain,” she wrote, and called for greater protection for children. In this regard, she asked for laws to be “tougher to protect children”. In that same letter, she stated that Tomás Gimeno wanted to make her suffer “by making me search for them tirelessly and for life”.

A change in tone and a legal perspective

From that point on, Amills’ interventions changed in tone. It was no longer just about asking for the search to continue, but about publicly accompanying a mother in the face of the worst possible news and demanding that the case not remain incomplete. Amills also insisted that locating Gimeno was important to confirm he had not fled and to prevent Beatriz from carrying that uncertainty. Amills refused to explain the crime as a fit of rage or madness and interpreted it as a conscious desire to cause maximum harm.

José Manuel Niederleytner had a low-key role. He was Beatriz Zimmermann’s lawyer, the legal voice of the case. And as he did at the time, Niederleytner again defended the work of the Civil Guard yesterday, referring not only to their excellent performance in the investigation but also to the human dimension. “All the officers got involved beyond the duties strictly assigned to them,” he recalled. “I have to admit that the work of the Civil Guard left a deep impression on me.”

The lawyer conveyed to the public at the time the importance of finding Gimeno alive or dead to “close the hypothesis of a escape and support the criminal response”. Yesterday he recalled that the case of the disappearance and search for Anna and Olivia “set a precedent” and “served to ensure that alerts for vicarious violence can be detected earlier”, allowing “faster action in similar situations”.

“Everyone rallied to help in this case,” the lawyer recalls. “At the beginning, we asked for public cooperation in case anyone saw a person matching Tomás Gimeno’s description, and at least a dozen alerts of possible suspects came in from different geographical points on the mainland, but unfortunately all of them were fruitless.”

And there was help from across the Atlantic too, Niederleytner reveals, recounting that “friends and relatives of Beatriz’s family contacted people linked to ports on the east coast of South America in case the presence of any pleasure boat with which Gimeno could have escaped was detected”.

The end of the search

The investigators and the investigating judge of the case were in constant contact with Beatriz Zimmermann, adds the Tenerife-based lawyer. The Civil Guard was waiting for reports from Forensics, DNA and the autopsy to close the case, at least as far as the police investigation part was concerned. For the investigators, there was “evidence that the bodies of Anna and Tomás were at the bottom of the sea; there was no evidence that the father had fled”.

The search area for the bodies underwater was rugged, deep and extremely difficult. After many days of searching without results, a meeting was held, which Beatriz Zimmermann attended, and it was decided to end the seabed work with the oceanographic vessel. The seabed had yielded one decisive piece of evidence and, at the same time, stubbornly refused to give up the others. At the end of June, the operation entered its final stretch. Beatriz Zimmermann addressed another letter to the crew of the Ángeles Alvariño and the Civil Guard. A letter in which she “thanked them for the work that allowed Olivia to be found” and for piecing together what had happened. “It is always better to know the truth,” she wrote, adding: “If they hadn’t found her, I would never have stopped searching.”

On 1 July 2021, the Ministry of Science confirmed the cessation of the Ángeles Alvariño‘s operations. In March 2022, the Court of Violence against Women number two of Santa Cruz de Tenerife ordered the provisional dismissal of the case until Tomás Gimeno was located. The judge, then the head of that court and now also president of the Trial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Esmeralda Casado, maintained that, from the Civil Guard’s investigations, it was clear that Gimeno was “with complete certainty” the perpetrator of the violent death of his daughters and ruled out the participation of third parties. But without the sole person under investigation present, no trial could be held.

A legacy of pain and change

Olivia’s autopsy determined a violent death compatible with mechanical asphyxia by suffocation. It was no longer a case of parental abduction or escape. What remained, according to the proceedings, was a premeditated crime against two girls, also designed to cause the greatest possible harm to their mother.

The case not only left a deep wound in society, it also changed how certain threats are heard: “You will never see your daughters again” could no longer be dismissed as just another phrase in a difficult breakup. Anna and Olivia became a symbol of vicarious violence: the violence that uses children to cause a mother irreversible harm.

Official figures keep that warning alive: since 1 January 2013, Spain has recorded 68 minors murdered as a result of gender-based violence.

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