It was difficult today for residents in calle Gran Via Serra de Alfabia in Santa Ponsa to put behind them the murder and suicide, which rocked the neighbourhood in the early hours of Thursday morning. The Guardia Civil’s criminal police were still combing the scene of the crime as they continued their investigation in to what is thought to have been a "crime of passion".
Sources close to the investigation have revealed that the 66-year-old Spanish businessman, Bernat Ferra, who shot and killed his ex-wife’s boyfriend at their home at 3.30am, had apparently been planning the attack for a number of days. Ferra is understood to have been obsessed about the relationship between his 36-year-old Russian ex-wife Olga and her new boyfriend, Joan Jose. Ferra had apparently been pressurising and trying to convince his ex-wife to come back to him.
The couple separated in 1998 and friends of Ferra have told investigators that he never got over the break-up. But it appears that Olga was deeply in love with her 36-year-old boyfriend and that the couple had been talking about getting married, even though they had only been together a few months.
But during that time Ferra had apparently bumped into the couple on a number of occasions and arguments had broken out between the two parties.
As the Guardia Civil continued trying to piece together what exactly provoked the shooting, sources revealed that Juan Jose was apparently shot twice - the second time proved fatal and was while he was lying wounded on the floor suffering from the first shot. Ferra then took his own life with the same shotgun.
Four murders in Majorca this year
It is proving to be a bloody year in Majorca. There have been four deaths - murders unless courts find otherwise - since January.
A Briton strangled his wife in Costa de la Calma, a young Colombian man asphyxiated his girlfriend in Son Servera, a Russian woman killed her husband in Cala Millor and on Thursday there was the Santa Ponsa incident.
On 23 January, Warren Lyttle was arrested on suspicion of having killed his wife Lisa by strangling her with the cable from a mobile phone charger. He rang the emergency services and told them that he had killed his wife.
On the night of 10 March, 22-year-old Carlos Villegas once more subjected his girlfriend to mistreatment. It was to be the final time. Victoria Sard Massanet, 19, of Russian origin but adopted by a Son Servera family when she was young, was asphyxiated by her boyfriend, who had a record of abuse. Some hours later and accompanied by a lawyer, he presented himself at the Guardia Civil station in Arta and confessed to having murdered Victoria.
Russian Svetla Batukova, 46, (pictured) killed her German husband, Horst Hans Henkels, 65, at their ground floor apartment in Cala Millor on 1 April. He had been stabbed.
All three are currently in custody awaiting trial.