Abandonados (2026) s01e02 Episode Script

1
Previously on ABANDONED
My name is Elvira,
and on the 22nd of April 1984
my brothers and I were abandoned
in the Estación de Francia
by a man named Denis.
They're unable to tell us the names
of their father or mother Nothing.
Now I want to know what really happened.
He had told us once, "They abandoned us."
I also remember having a real gun
and shooting it and it really scaring me.
And I thought it was a dream.
They don't want to use names
to cover something up.
Maybe they'd left the kids there
to protect them, as if to say,
"You won't touch my kids."
How do you start looking with nothing?
If you come to the house,
I'll tell you something important.
She pulls out a folder.
She says she's saved it for 40 years.
My mother told us,
"Raymond, mafioso, Barcelona".
Just a few days after abandoning the kids.
We were under the impression
this could be your father.
My mother takes out an envelope.
It says, "Don't open."
Ramón and I, with all this mystery
And she says,
"Your father and I saved this document
and decided that the day you wanted
to look for
your parents, we'd give it to you.
Raymond Vaccarazi Was Planning a Robbery
The first hypothesis was
that he was their dad.
Because Raymond, mafioso,
Barcelona, shortly after
abandoning the kids
The fact that he was murdered
confirms he was mafia,
and one of his friends
rightly left the kids in Barcelona.
I was speechless.
And I remember my brother Ramón
took the newspaper, read it
And I see it's not my father.
I don't recognize him.
I remember him as more successful,
more long white hair.
Not the man in the photo.
Even so, my mother
insisted. "Look for this story.
Look for news about
this person.
There you go."
ABANDONED
I'd thought a lot about abandonment
and something major must have happened.
Because I don't see the logic in just
leaving three kids there like that.
We waited for it,
for it to awaken in them.
I never thought about who'd be first.
But, when it happened,
it made sense that it was Elvira.
She's been the most enterprising.
From being the first to leave home,
to moving house six or seven times,
to changing partners
The most
active in terms of searching
and changing is Elvira.
So, logically, it was her.
It's clear that we're not Vaccarazi's kids
but, what if we were the kids of a mafioso
who operated in Costa Brava
in the 1980s?
Police uncover the operations
of foreign criminal groups
in Costa Brava
The persistence of these activities
in one of Spain's long established
main tourist destinations
has been proved
through a rigorous police investigation
led by the Civil Administration of Girona.
The investigation revealed the identity
of approximately 200 foreign nationals,
mainly Italian, French and German,
who have been recommended
for deportation due to suspected ties
to mafia organizations.
"Ding!" We have our DNA test results.
On Myheritage, one part is a map,
and on the map you see
where you're mainly from.
I'm hoping to see
a big mark over all of France.
So, when I open the map,
all of a sudden I see the south
of Spain.
Woosh.
I was like "This test is wrong."
I'll have to do another one.
It blew my mind.
Really.
Every time you see a "match",
you can click on it
and send a little message.
I decide to write a standard message
in different languages
to send out.
Although I got in touch
with the people it suggested
as a match,
I didn't quite know how to proceed.
I found myself going down a dead end.
My friend Berni recommended
going on the radio show Islàndia,
broadcast on RAC1, in Barcelona.
Initially I said no
because I'm very reluctant
to put my personal life on display.
But then Marco, my children's dad,
and a key player in this story,
gave me a final nudge
and support for me to give it a shot.
I'll be grateful for the rest of my life.
Finally, I decide to go on the radio
and we made a recording.
It's 7:00, this is Islàndia.
Today on Islàndia, an incredible story.
The protagonist is Elvira Moral.
It's been nearly 40 years
and she's decided
to look for her biological parents.
She knows nothing, not even where to begin
but she wants to understand
why, on that 22 of April 1984,
her life changed.
The day the show went out, I decided
to take a shower and not listen to it.
And when I got out of the shower,
it was still only halfway through the show
and I started getting
tons of WhatsApp messages
from friends, acquaintances, people
childhood friends of mine who I hadn't
been in contact with for ages, saying,
"Elvira, we're listening to you
on the radio.
It's you, right? Your story."
The best would be someone saying,
"This story rings a bell!"
Maybe a relative will show up,
but I doubt it
If anyone relates to my situation,
who can direct, help, guide me
and give me some idea which way to go next
because I feel rather lost and alone
It was absolutely amazing.
The radio show became a before
and an after on this journey
because, suddenly, a ton of people
started sending us emails and messages.
Right when they abandoned us,
in Barcelona they caught
a French mobster called Raymond Vaccarizi.
His house was in L'Escala
and he was incarcerated in La Modelo.
We got a pretty important email
due to the information it contained.
"Hi, I know a 77-year-old woman
who's from L'Escala.
In L'Escala,
there was a family with three kids.
The eldest was called Ramón,
with a middle son and a little girl.
They had a pizza parlor in town in the 80s
but everyone thought it was a front
because the family lived in a house
in a residential estate near the town
protected by high walls
with video surveillance cameras
at every corner.
Lots of luxury cars came
and went from that house.
At the pizza parlor, the kids' mother
was named Jacqueline and was French.
Just before Raymond was killed in prison,
there was a vendetta
among three Italian families in L'Escala."
An explosive device exploded at 4 a.m.
in the pizza parlor El Port, in L'Escala
and caused over three million pesetas
of damage.
The email linked the mobsters' vendetta,
the pizza parlor
and the mansion.
We want to meet
the 77-year-old woman in the email,
but the woman who wrote the email said no
she didn't want to speak.
Raymond Vaccarazi Was Planning a Robbery
Following off Raymond Vaccarizi,
we start looking for every article
about him and what happened
to the people around him, the clans
Caught smuggling currencies
two members of the Canavaggio clan
Greco, one of the masterminds
After basically documenting
all the mobsters,
we try to see where they lived
and which homes were theirs,
and looking on Google Maps,
one looks a bit familiar to me,
or could be somewhere we'd been.
We were going to go.
L'ESCALA
COSTA BRAVA, CATALONIA
Okay, now it's this whole road,
straight ahead, straight ahead
Straight.
Okay?
And now, take the next left.
Ramón remembered something
serious that had happened in the house,
not really the house itself.
This one, this one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.
I had made some sketches
to see if they matched this house.
- Hi.
- Hi.
- Hi.
- How are you?
The current owner of the house
let us look over the house
to see if it was the one I remembered.
When I went in the house,
some things were familiar to me
and some weren't.
I did ask the owner and he told me
it'd had a few renovations.
- There was an entrance staircase here.
- Yeah, there was.
- It came to here.
- Yes it did.
The staircase came down here?
Yes, it was this one here.
The staircase that you
that we were at the top of.
I remember a wall
Well, sure
That was paved over.
Yeah, yes.
There was a staircase and it was covered,
the entrance, and had some columns.
And the main entrance was here.
We're talking about when I was six.
- I'm 46 now.
- Are you the eldest? Okay.
The point is, we were alone,
he and I, up there.
And there was a gun on the table.
So I picked up the gun
and I aimed it at him.
And then one day,
when we went upstairs,
we left the door open
and instead of shooting him, I turned
and shot, let's say, down the stairs.
- You shot?
- Yeah, I shot and scared myself.
And he didn't kill me.
He did this and fired.
A shot rang out.
I remember the spark when it hit
the floor at the base of the stairs.
And he didn't shoot me
Miraculously. Miraculously.
He almost killed me.
Ramón said the stairs had been bigger.
At first glance, it doesn't seem
that way due to the layout.
But Richi insisted it was,
since everything else rang a bell
That whole area.
Yes, it's this one, it is this one, Ramón.
It could be, but
It had a staircase coming down, that's it.
It was this one.
- Could we go up here alone? To see if
- Yeah.
There's a bit of a disagreement
between my middle and eldest brothers.
You got it from here, Ramón,
the gun. From here, I swear.
Was it the first floor?
- No, it was like this, going down.
- No, it was this.
This is the house, this is the house. No
But if you don't have stairs to here,
- it doesn't fit.
- Okay, because of the renovations.
They changed it, right?
There was a staircase
that came down to here.
This was the house.
I could tell.
It's a question of energy.
And I was there.
This was the house.
- Do you have any photos of the old house?
- I don't.
We asked him
if he could contact the real estate
agency to get some photos from them
to see if we could see the house
as it used to be before he bought it.
We'll wait to see
if David can get us those photos.
But everything seems to indicate
that, yes, we were in L'Escala.
Out of all the emails people sent me,
one of them
was from a woman named Montse.
She's a criminologist
who helps people
look for people who disappeared
in the Civil War and the dictatorship.
She sympathized with our situation
and offered us her help.
Montse told us she's spent many years
looking for a great-uncle of hers
who never returned from the war.
So, she understands our desire to search.
I decided to help her
because I recognized that feeling
of searching,
which I had seen in other victims
who were sure their relatives were dead.
Here, we were still in time
to find them alive.
The reason was different,
but the feeling the same, yeah.
That of searching
and not having answers to many things.
I know Montse can understand me, and that,
for me, is already a huge help.
Plus, she takes care of me
like a big sister.
I want her to investigate,
but I also want her to protect herself.
Since she's looking for answers,
but doesn't know what she'll find.
Sometimes, desperation makes you
try everything.
I keep thinking
this is a particularly strange case.
It's very unlikely
that she'll find her biological family,
because she knows nothing.
You have no surnames,
no birth certificates.
There's nothing.
Maybe I can follow this path with her,
but we don't know
if the path will last one day,
one year or for life.
Montse, obviously, is very frank
and very realistic,
but never stops telling me
We're going to try. Let's get started.
The protagonist is Elvira Moral,
a 39-year-old woman who, when she was two,
was abandoned
in the Estación de Francia, in Barcelona,
she and her two brothers.
I'm listening to the radio
and I hear a story that hooks me.
Traps me.
And when I'm done listening,
I think I can do something.
I think, I believe I can help this person.
My name is Carmen Pastor
and I was born in France, but I've lived
in Spain for 41 years.
We're semi-nomadic.
Our home is a camper van.
Carmen Pastor is an incredible person,
in her free time she investigates for fun.
I have her saved in my phone as "Penélope"
from the TV show Criminal Minds.
And when I start investigating something,
it's like an obsession.
There's no time for other things.
My partner is incredibly patient.
I think what made me
so interested in this story
is that I linked it to my stuff.
I thought, with all the hints
and clues they mentioned
They say
you could see a leg of the Eiffel Tower,
that there was a toy store,
and this and that
I started looking without saying a word.
To her or to anyone.
I'm going to write a post on Facebook,
one for France and one for Spain.
And I'm going to post this
on all the Facebook groups
where I think it might catch on.
"The 22nd of April 1984,
three kids were abandoned
in the Estación de Francia in Barcelona.
The kids showed no signs of neglect.
They were clean, well-groomed
and adequately clothed."
So, I ask people to share it.
And I say,
"Elvira needs her story to go viral.
Among all of us, we can find clues
or someone who knows the answers."
And, surprisingly
because this had never happened to me,
I start to get a lot of interest
So much so that 16,000 people share it.
She was already well on her way.
When she contacted me, she gave me
street names and addresses.
She had ideas about
how to search, what to do
IN SEARCH OF OUR PARENTS
To me this is magic made reality.
Everything's in the comments.
People calling me crazy
THIS IS RIDICULOUS AND STUPID
That I'm making it all up
LIES!
If I want to write a book
Or if it's a screenplay
of a film coming out soon.
But there are also people
giving me ideas and clues.
That's actually what I was looking for.
For example,
Marie-Caroline suggested so many things
that I was struck by this person
and thought, "My goodness, who is she?"
CHÂTEAUROUX
FRANCE
I'm Marie-Caroline.
I live in France.
I'm 52. I'm an accounting clerk
and an amateur genealogist.
All of it seemed really mysterious
to me from the beginning.
It has nothing to do
with a classic case of child abandonment.
It's more like a sort of detective story.
I immediately want to help.
I want to propose lots of ideas.
Lots of things occur to me.
I must've added five or six comments
to the post
as ideas came to me.
And that's how
I started working on this story.
Marie-Caroline was joined
by another incredible investigator,
called Sylvia.
FLORANGE
FRANCE
My name's Sylvia. I'm 46.
I'm a professional genealogist.
I often participate in
volunteer investigations,
also in paternity investigations.
When I saw the photo
and read the presentation
of their story by Carmen Pastor,
I was shocked and moved.
As a mother,
it's inconceivable to me that someone
could abandon three children.
Then I got the urge to help.
I said to myself,
if I could do something to help them,
I would like to.
They're my generation
and I asked myself,
"How can you live your whole life
not knowing what happened,
where we're from
and who we are deep down?"
We created a WhatsApp group
with my brother Ramón, me,
and the growing group of people
who were helping thanks to this post.
And Carmen became the leader of the group.
She was doing a screening.
She was choosing people based on the needs
she thought were arising.
She looked for people
who she believed
could help the investigation.
My brother made sketches of his memories
and I sent them to Carmen.
She shared them in the group.
She started creating a network of people
from France, from Belgium,
who started helping us
voluntarily. It was something
I fed the group information
and they helped us search.
My goal is to immerse myself
in their childhood at that point
to get the most information possible.
So the basic question is,
are they French or Spanish?
THE SPEAK ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY IN FRENCH
And the little details of daily life.
Did they have a cat? A dog?
Are there things they can remember?
Where did they play?
Did they go to a park?
What did the park look like?
One of the memories,
for example, we started from,
was a memory of when we were little
in París when we went to the park.
There was a fountain
with a wall and a spout of water.
We used to play and run along the edge.
All the little details of daily life
that a child can remember
actually help recreate the environment
and, perhaps, obtain information
so we can follow the thread
and get more facts.
I remember a toy store
that we could see from home.
To get to the park,
we always passed in front of it.
Above everything
there was a huge crocodile.
I loved it.
It was awesome.
Like this big.
I'm not sure if it was inflated foam board
because in the 80s,
I don't know if they had the inflatables,
but it was a crocodile and it was huge.
That's what we remember a bit.
Ray thinks it's impossible.
A fountain, a toy store
There are thousands.
I told him, "We can, we can."
It's a matter of putting in the time.
TOY STORE 1980s PARIS
I find a photo of a building
where you can see the toy store.
It was exactly the type of street
near the Eiffel Tower.
I give it to Ramón.
Maybe it will help him refresh his memory.
And it's familiar. Yes Yes.
Two members of the investigation team
lived near the Eiffel Tower as children.
So with their help
we narrowed it down even further.
And, in fact, when Sylvia found
the photo of the toy store, it fit.
We fly to Paris to meet the volunteer
who seems to know the toy store.
His name is Regis.
We meet in front of the store,
which isn't a toy store anymore,
but a cookware store.
When I saw the post,
in the help from friends group,
someone was looking for a store
in the seventh district
with a crocodile on the ceiling.
I didn't hesitate for a minute.
It had to be this one,
where I used to come
as a child to buy models,
to dream in front of the toys.
When you entered,
on the left side, on the ceiling,
was the crocodile.
You remember it too, don't you?
What you described about the crocodile,
that it was a bit further that way
it all makes sense to me.
If what Regis said is true,
it means the fountain can't be far.
So, we start looking for parks
with fountains
in the area around the Eiffel Tower
to see if we can find it.
There's one here in
- I think it is
- It's smaller.
Look. See?
It would be more like this.
Here, you see.
There's a potential fountain,
so we go to look for the fountain in the
park by the Eiffel Tower.
Do you remember bringing me too?
Yes, I didn't go alone.
I went with others.
When he talks about it,
he says "we played".
Of course, what
I remember is a park with sand
and a big fountain with greenery
and some tiles shaped like
they must've been three meters
by three meters.
And we used to walk on the edge
and try not to fall in the fountain.
What I remember is the journey
and the park.
It's true that,
when I arrived, I was shocked.
The first thing it occurred to me to do
was walk around the fountain,
which isn't a normal,
let alone adult, thing to do.
But it's what I needed
to do to confirm my memory,
because that's what I did as a child.
Sure, at five or six, you're here I mean
It feels like you're falling.
You know what I told you?
There was grass, sand
It all fits.
Amazing.
No, no. Almost 80 or 90 percent sure.
Knowing that the memories
of the toy store and the park
aligned with what we'd found,
now we needed
to find the apartment we'd lived in.
But it's a complicated task
because there are lots of buildings,
there are lots of windows
that have the same angle
to be able to see the toy store.
We went looking for the angle
of the leg of the Eiffel Tower
and to see if any doors
or windows looked familiar to us.
It's true that this entire area
has high purchasing power.
They didn't let us go up to check.
Not even the doorways.
We didn't want to go in the flat.
We left posters and notes
at each of the buildings
to see if any neighbor
remembered a Spanish couple
with three kids names
Richi, Ramón and Elvira.
Ramón's memories were taking shape,
but we realized
that there's no trace of our lives.
It seemed they were kids
who'd passed totally unnoticed.
With no school,
no doctor, no vaccines, nothing.
The past was all blurry, foggy.
There's nothing there.
Marie-Caroline had many questions
about our past before we'd been abandoned.
She asked us, for example,
if we'd been baptized,
if we interacted with other kids,
if we had parties in our house.
They also traveled a lot,
and that must've muddled
the kids' memories a bit.
As for food, there was nothing specific.
They said
they saw many other adults, but no kids.
There were many adults
around their parents who came and went.
Lots of people in the house, etc.
As for language, they'd learned French.
But were their parents French or Spanish?
That's not very clear.
There's a memory
my eldest brother repeats a lot,
about an old woman dressed in black
and we don't really know
how or where to place her.
I remember an elderly woman
dressed in black,
with wrinkles.
Like a dark-skinned gypsy woman,
and she was in a bad mood.
I also remember an enormous glass of milk
and the milk full of cream
because they must've warmed it,
and having to drink that cream every day,
which I hated.
It traumatized me a bit,
because I didn't like it.
And she made me drink it.
"You have to drink your milk."
We asked Ramón,
"You really remember nothing else?
Not the tiniest detail or feeling?
I don't know, a smell, something
that reminds you of that time."
You keep digging and digging,
but nothing really becomes clear.
Or, at least, nothing we can use.
So many hours without stopping,
because I used to go to bed
doing searches on my phone.
Sometimes, while I was sleeping,
I'd think of something, I'd get an idea,
and I'd have to get up and write it down.
I said, "I'll forget it tomorrow."
The volume of information we received
was so great,
especially at certain times,
that during work I take off
my smart watch, which gives notifications,
because I was working
and constantly looking at the phone
and I couldn't concentrate.
Notification, notification.
And when you open one,
you want to read all the answers
because people are saying,
"We've found this. This street could fit,
I'll send you a photo."
Of course, you're working and saying,
"Wait, I'll go to the bathroom."
I always told Elvira
that this was a long-distance race.
She wasn't going to find
her family in two days.
That she might never find them.
And that in this long-distance race,
there would be ups and downs
and straightaways.
I don't care.
I don't care
because I'm in it till the end.
When she wants something, she gets it.
That's undeniable.
She's a machine.
Elvira and her brothers had done
a DNA test several weeks prior
and were awaiting the results.
That would let us know
if they were really siblings
with the same father and mother.
We waited impatiently.
And furthermore,
there's a line of inquiry
at the civil registry.
Find the birth certificates.
We start from the births being registered
in the civil registry
with the names Ramón, Richard and Elvira,
and in Paris or the greater Paris area.
At that time
I think about 200 Richards were born
in Paris in those years.
So that's unusable.
There must've been about ten Ramons.
And Elviras, just four or five baby girls.
That's when the more technical
and complicated phase began
but, luckily,
we had two incredible genealogists
who spent hours
and hours analyzing the data.
And that's when
we made the first discoveries.
The three kids are siblings
and have the same parents.
We confirmed their Iberian heritage.
The genealogists told me
there were three people who shared our DNA
who were very interesting.
They are Angela, Jenifer and Ricardo.
So all our efforts focus on Ángela,
but she doesn't answer
our messages.
She gave no sign of life.
We tried everything to contact her.
That's it, she'd vanished.
Plan B was the very interesting
match with Jenifer.
I investigate on Facebook
and her friends.
I found a post from when she lost her dog.
In that post, there was a phone number.
So, I sent a WhatsApp message.
Jenifer replied
that she had no contact with her relatives
but she gave us a very interesting lead.
She knew her father,
according to her memories,
was a gypsy.
That was very interesting because Ramón
had memories of an old woman all in black,
and that could fit.
I was shocked to see my brother's memories
turning into real facts.
Jenifer's lead didn't give us results,
so we tried to contact her cousin Ricardo.
Ricardo didn't come up,
but Carmen searched through his relatives.
So, among this Ricardo's cousins
was an Isabel.
I explained everything to Isabel,
and she says, "Don't get me worked up.
Leave me in peace."
She was rude to me.
She put me off, she spoke rudely to me.
Before that,
I had done a study of these people.
This girl, I saw, had lost a child.
So, to a person who's lost a child,
if you talk about feelings,
about parents who might be searching
for their kids, or kids
who've spent their lives
trying to find out who their mom is,
sooner or later you'll connect.
So, maybe she'll start listening to me.
So then, she tells me that
Okay. She'll ask around.
She doesn't know anything,
but she'll ask her relatives.
She asks her family and tells me,
"Hey, yeah. It's true.
They remember a situation
many years ago when some relatives
disappeared and
they never heard from them again.
A couple and their three kids."