The judge confronted the kids with this information, according to Triuso’s article in Panorama, and although they were surprised, they didn’t change their statements.

The Marked Boy

A cold case, say the criminal lawyers, and too old a subject for journalists. I wasn’t able to look for Beatriz Bradford again for a while. Work and personal matters kept me in Buenos Aires. I managed to speak with Eduardo Álvarez’s mother, who asked for my discretion. She had donated a DNA sample to help identify her son, but she wasn’t active in any human rights organizations. She was angry with her daughter-in-law and with her son, and she thought the disappearance of her granddaughter, whom she had seen only on occasion (“Beatriz’s fault—she’s a bad person”) could be linked to her son’s activism. I couldn’t get anything else out of her except the promise of an interview that never came to pass.

I couldn’t get access to Beatriz’s family. After a call to their offices, I immediately received a reply from a lawyer: if I continued, I would be accused of harassment. The lawyer’s tone was menacing. Was it possible Beatriz lived with her mother? Some of my sources who’d heard rumors about the Bradford family assured me it was her mother who took care of her. I persisted through other routes, but reaching the Bradfords turned out to be extremely difficult: at every attempt, I received a reply from their lawyers. The phones were always answered by icy secretaries. The properties were guarded. That family is a country within the country.

Meanwhile, I wanted to talk to one of the kids who had gone into the house with Adela. They weren’t kids anymore, though. It wasn’t so easy. Victoria Peirano’s parents wouldn’t see me, and over the phone the mother told me her daughter had worked too hard to recover from what had happened only for me to come around years later and remind her of it just for the sake of my own vanity. I wanted to argue that my vanity had nothing to do with it, but she hung up on me. I got a similar reply from the Fonzi family, although, shockingly, they gave me an address for Gaspar Peterson, the third kid, who lived with his uncle. They gave it to me with what seemed like indifference, as if it were a trivial thing. They didn’t give me a phone number, nor could I find one in the phone book. I decided to visit him. He lived in Villa Elisa, a middle-class suburb near La Plata.