Rudolf Eschmann, nicknamed ‘El Suizo’ has been the main line of investigation into the case for years. The strongest clue to solve the whereabouts of David Guerrero, the Painter Boy from Malaga, who disappeared thirty-five years ago. He was the number one suspect. The possible perpetrator of a hypothetical kidnapping. But this route seems exhausted. The key was the caricature of an older man, made by David and given to his friend Gema Calderón, the same day that she lost track of him. The police considered that it could correspond to the face of “El Suizo”, who died three years after the disappearance of the minor due to natural causes.
There were similarities in different facial features. The suspect was staying at the Los Naranjos hotel in Malaga when the event occurred. He was a lover of photography and, above all, he took snapshots of minors on the street. It was thought that he might have met David at some point. Eschmann stayed at that establishment between the months of March and April 1987. It is April 6 when the minor disappeared.
This hypothesis seems to be diluted definitively
The Malaga national police decided to review the case again in 2019. It was about looking for a twist with a different perspective, taking advantage of new scientific knowledge. Now that bet has paid off. This is a physiognomic study of the face of “El Suizo”, carried out by the scientific police. This yields not hopeful results. After analyzing all of David Guerrero’s pictorial work, he has concluded that the caricature does not represent suspect number one. According to the report, neither the strokes nor the technique correspond to the style of the disappeared. Researchers have focused on the way David drew the nose and earlobes of his characters, and find no match. They are convinced that David would never have drawn that man that way.
The thirteen-year-old boy painter was considered a promise of painting in Malaga. The Christ of the Good Death was his last painting. The afternoon he disappeared, he left his house to go to an exhibition of his. A journalist was going to interview him there. But he never made it to the appointment. The trail of him was lost on the way.
Who is the mysterious 70-year-old man nicknamed ‘the Swiss’?
Three years after the disappearance, the trail of the mysterious Swiss man, in his seventies, surfaced. A chambermaid from the Los Naranjos hotel in Malaga contacted the investigators to say that she had found a napkin with the name of the minor on it and his neighborhood. She said: “David Guerrero Guevara. Huelín.” She was in the room supposedly occupied by the Swiss citizen. The waitress said that it had taken her three years to go to the police because she was afraid of getting mixed up in a shady deal.
Agents investigated the suspect’s surroundings. He was divorced and remarried. He had several children. It all started in 1990. They couldn’t even question him, because he had died that same year. But they did review his photographic archive, and they did not find a single clue that linked him to the Painter boy. However, the Swiss store remained open until today, when it seems ruled out.
The family of the minor, his mother and his brothers, have suffered a lot, but they have never lost hope. However, they have always thought that there was no remarkable resemblance between the Swiss and the caricature. Now this report dismantles this route. The case of the child Painter remains unsolved.
