On Sunday, November 15, 1992, in the big house on calle 48 between 11 and 12 in the center of La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires Province, the dentist Ricardo Alberto Barreda took a shotgun and killed the four women he lived with: his wife, Gladys Margarita McDonald, fifty-seven; their daughters, Cecilia, twenty-six, and Adriana, twenty-four; and his mother-in-law, Elena Arreche, eighty-six. The prosecutor at his trial, Héctor Vogliolo, argued that he had picked a Sunday because it was the one day all four would be at home.
Barreda was born in La Plata on June 16, 1936. By the reconstruction Argentine reporting carries, he shot his wife first, then Cecilia, then Adriana, and his mother-in-law last. He got rid of the shotgun and the shells at Punta Lara and spent the night with a woman he was seeing. At first he denied everything and tried to make the killings look like a robbery, and said he had been fishing that weekend; the story came apart, he confessed, and he was detained on November 16, 1992.
Because he admitted the shootings, the trial that opened almost three years later before the first chamber of the La Plata criminal court was not about who had fired but about whether he had understood what he was doing. He testified on August 7 and 14, 1995, and told the judges the women of his family had mistreated and humiliated him for years. The defense expert Bartolomé Capurro said he suffered from a delusional psychosis. Vogliolo told the court there was no morbid alteration of his faculties that had kept him from understanding the criminality of what he did.
On August 14, 1995, the court convicted him and sentenced him to reclusión perpetua, life imprisonment. The verdict was not unanimous. Judge María Clelia Rosenstock dissented, finding that he had acted without the capacity to understand or control his acts because of a chronic, systematized delusional psychosis; her colleagues Carlos Hortel and Pedro Soria found him responsible. The killings of his wife and daughters were treated as homicide aggravated by the family relationship, and that of his mother-in-law as simple homicide, because the law's aggravating relationship did not extend to a mother-in-law. The Buenos Aires provincial supreme court and the national Supreme Court upheld the conviction, which became final on May 2, 2007.
He served his time at Unit 9 in La Plata and Unit 34 at Melchor Romero, studied law, and met a teacher, Berta André, known as Pochi, who was visiting a relative; they became a couple. Early in 2008 he was granted house arrest for good conduct and for being over seventy, and moved into her apartment in Belgrano, Buenos Aires. The benefit was revoked in January 2011 after he left without permission, saying he was going to a pharmacy, restored on February 11, and on March 29, 2011, the court of appeals granted him conditional release on the ground that his time served under the two-for-one computation exceeded the sentence. "When justice arrives late," he said, "it is not justice."
Freedom did not last cleanly. The relationship with André deteriorated, and reports say he mistreated her; in 2014 his benefit was revoked and he was returned to prison at Olmos. André died in 2015 of a neurological illness. In December 2015, after a friend rented him a house in Tigre, he was again granted conditional release, and on May 17, 2016, the execution judge Raúl Dalto declared the sentence extinguished, freeing him from all judicial supervision, almost twenty-four years after the killings.
Whether he was ever sorry is disputed. The forensic expert Miguel Maldonado, who interviewed him forty-eight hours after the killings, said Barreda never repented. In an interview while he was free, Barreda said he was very sorry, above all about his younger daughter, and that it still seemed unreal to him. His last years were spent in poverty, including a period living in the corridors of a hospital in General Pacheco. With Alzheimer's disease advancing, he entered the Del Rosario care home in March 2020, and died there of cardiac arrest on May 25, 2020, at eighty-three; reports place the home in José C. Paz or in neighboring San Martín. In Argentina the case is remembered as one of the country's defining femicides.