Ricardo Alberto Barreda was a dentist in La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires Province, and lived with his wife, his two adult daughters and his mother-in-law in a large house on calle 48 in the center of the city. On Sunday November 15, 1992 he shot all four of them dead with a shotgun.
The order, according to the reconstruction Argentine reporting now carries, was his wife Gladys McDonald first, then his daughter Cecilia, then his daughter Adriana, and last his mother-in-law Elena Arreche. Gladys was fifty-seven, Cecilia twenty-six, Adriana twenty-four and Elena eighty-six. The prosecutor at trial, Hector Vogliolo, argued that Barreda had chosen a Sunday deliberately, because it was the day all four women would be in the house together.
He disposed of the shotgun and the shells away from the house, at Punta Lara, and spent the night at a hotel with a woman he was seeing. The following day he went to the police to report the killings, and within a short time confessed to them. He was detained on November 16, 1992.
Because he had admitted the shootings, the trial that opened almost three years later was not about who had fired. It was about whether he had understood what he was doing, and it became an argument between psychiatrists and psychologists. The defense case was that years of humiliation at home had produced a psychiatric collapse; the expert Bartolome Capurro testified that Barreda suffered from a delusional psychosis. Vogliolo told the court there was no morbid alteration of his mental faculties that had prevented him understanding the criminality of his actions.
On August 14, 1995 the tribunal convicted him and sentenced him to life. The verdict was not unanimous. Judge Maria Rosenstock dissented, writing that she had reached the conviction that Barreda had acted without the capacity to understand the criminality of the act or to direct his actions, being affected by a systematized and chronic delusional psychosis in the form of a delusion of vindication. The other two judges found him criminally responsible. The conviction was later upheld by both the Buenos Aires provincial supreme court and the national Supreme Court. The killings of his wife and daughters were treated as homicide aggravated by the family relationship; the killing of his mother-in-law was charged as simple homicide, because the court held that a mother-in-law did not fall within that aggravating relationship.
He served sixteen years. He was held at Unit 9 in La Plata and at Unit 34 at Melchor Romero, studied law in prison, and there met a teacher, Berta Andre, who was visiting a relative; they became a couple. In 2008 he was granted house arrest on grounds of good conduct and of being over seventy, and went to live at her apartment in the Belgrano district of Buenos Aires. In March 2011 the first chamber of the La Plata criminal appeals court granted him conditional release, holding that the computation of time served exceeded the sentence imposed; the so-called two-for-one calculation was decisive. Asked about it, he said that when justice arrives late it is not justice.
Whether he was ever sorry is disputed in the record. The forensic expert Miguel Maldonado, who interviewed him forty-eight hours after the killings, said afterwards that Barreda never repented killing the women of his family. In an interview published while he was at liberty, Barreda said he was very sorry, that he regretted most of all his younger daughter, and that what had happened still seemed unreal to him. He died on May 25, 2020 in a care home in Jose C. Paz, where he had been admitted as Alzheimer's disease advanced. His only regular visitor had a cross placed at his grave the following month reading, repentant of the sins I committed.
In Argentina the case is not filed as a curiosity. It is remembered as one of the country's defining femicide prosecutions, and as a life sentence that ran for sixteen years.