Boy 'vanished' after acid tanker crash killed parents – and still hasn't been found – Daily Star
The strange story of nine-year-old Juan Pedro Martinez, who disappeared after the tanker his dad was driving ran off a Spanish road, has defied investigators for years
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A young boy's treat for getting a good school report led to one of the strangest, and most mysterious missing persons cases in European history.
Juan Pedro Martínez’s dad Andrés was a long-distance lorry driver and the nine-year-old had always hoped to be taken on a trip in the huge red-painted Volvo tanker.
“Juan had just got his best report card ever and so, as a reward for doing so well in school, Juan's father had surprised Juan and Juan's mum with a plan to drive from their hometown in south-eastern Spain all the way across the country to the northern coast,” explained podcaster Mr Ballen.
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“Once they got there Juan's dad would offload the cargo that he had driven there Juan and his mum and dad would stick around and kind of make a vacation out of it going to the beaches and checking out the beautiful pastures where all the cows would graze. Juan was super-excited.”
Andrés’s truck was hitched to a trailer covered in hazmat warnings, and the family set off on their adventure with the delighted boy listening to audiobooks in the back of the cab.
They stopped at a café on the way, and the waiter who served them later said he had noticed nothing untoward about the family. But early in the morning of June 25, 1986, Andrés suddenly started driving erratically.
Eyewitnesses later said they thought the Volvo’s brakes had failed. The truck sideswiped one vehicle, knocking its wing mirror off, before ramming another car from behind until it is forced off the road. Finally, Andrés’s lorry smashed into an oncoming vehicle
The shaken driver of the other car got out his motor and looked down to where the lorry had overturned. No one appeared to be getting out and he had just decided to go and check on the occupants when a white Nissan van pulled up.
Mr Ballen continued: “A woman with blonde hair jumped out and she ran over to him and said ‘I'm a nurse do you need any help?’ This guy's looking at this woman and he's sizing her up and she didn’t seem like a nurse. In fact she just made him feel really uncomfortable he couldn't quite put his finger on it.”
At this point the still-shaken driver noticed that the driver of the van was a man with the same striking blond hair and blue eyes as the “nurse”. But despite his doubts he told her he was fine, and urged her to check on the occupants of the truck.
“She rushed over to the truck and climbed on top of it and then reached down and took something out of the truck. From the driver's perspective – around 100 feet away – he couldn't tell what she had taken out of the cab. But after she took whatever it was, she climbed off the cab, she did not attempt to help anybody inside of the truck, she jumped back in the white van and the white van sped off down the road.
It was at this point that bystanders realised that the hazardous cargo the truck had been hauling was pure sulphuric acid – a powerfully corrosive liquid that could cause serious burns.
When rescuers arrived, they immediately began dumping sand and lime over the acid to prevent it from polluting the nearby Duratón River. It was only later, when a police officer called Juan’s grandmother to break the news that Andrés and his wife Carmen were dead, that they learned the young boy had also been with them.
A frantic search of the area yielded no clues. All the sand that had been dumped at the crash site was sifted in hope of finding the missing boy’s remains. A theory that the powerful acid could have completely dissolved the boy’s body was ruled out – there simply hadn’t been enough time for that to happen.
To add to the mystery, an examination of the truck showed no signs of any mechanical problem that could have caused the fatal accident. But examination of its tachometer revealed that Andrés had slowed down and made several unexplained short stops as it climbed the narrow mountain road.
Spanish newspaper El País, reported that traces of heroin had been found in the truck, but there was no evidence linking Andrés or Carmen to any criminal cartel. The fair-haired couple from the Nissan were never traced, and despite a number of reported sightings Juan has never been seen again.
Multiple theories have been offered to explain the boy’s seemingly instant disappearance, but the unexplained car crash on Spain’s Somosierra mountain pass remains one of the strangest missing-persons cases on record.
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