Hunt for Anna and Olivia Day 38: Police create psychological profile of father

The Guardia Civil has started a ‘psychological autopsy’ of Tomás Gimeno, the father of the two girls from Tenerife who are still missing after 38 days. Authorities hope that this psychological profile will help to locate Anna and Olivia, aged 1 and 6, who disappeared along with their father on April 27th.

According to police sources the study is being prepared by seven criminologists and psychologists from the Criminal Behavioural Analysis Service (SACD) of the Guardia Civil, a unit created 26 years ago and which has participated in other high profile cases of disappearances in Spain, including those of Diana Quer and Gabriel Cruz.

The psychological autopsy is intended to get into the mind of the alleged criminal, in this case Tomas Gimeno, which involves gathering all the psychosocial information of the subject, "if possible as far back as kindergarten": how he behaved, how he related to or reacted to problems. Agents have already collected testimonies from former partners, friends, co-workers, and family members.

Experts pay special attention to behaviour changes due to a change of circumstances in someone’s life. In this case, a clear trigger was the fact that his ex-wife, Beatriz Zimmerman, decided to separate from him last summer. Apparently he only found out recently that she had a new partner, a Belgian man much older than him, and allegedly this new relationship with the girls' mother bothered him a lot.

The researchers are also focusing on Gimeno's hobbies and frustrations. Videos have recently come to light in which he talks about his "dream" of being a rally driver, and he even appeared in a competition organized by a Tenerife team.

They are also paying close attention to another of Tomás's hobbies, sailing, especially considering that the last time he was seen he was loading suitcases and bags of clothes on to a boat in the Santa Cruz Marina.

However, the thing that they are especially focusing on is finding out what Gimeno really was like when he was alone with his daughters. This is important to decide which line of investigation has more weight, and to decipher if it is indeed a disappearance and he has fled to another country, or if in actual fact, he is capable of murder.

The Ángeles Alvariño keeps searching 24 hours a day:
In the meantime the Ángeles Alvariño oceanographic search ship is continuing its seabed search of the Tenerife coast. Yesterday they revealed that the ‘item of interest’ that they picked upon sonar, turned out to be a bag of rubbish, highlighting not just how sensitive the equipment is, but what they have to contend with in their search.

The steep and abundant underwater cliffs, as well as the rocky seabed, are making their job difficult as they focus on an area decided by the route Tomas’s boat before being found, the range of the boat when fuelled, and phone activity before he disappeared.

Yesterday the main area was re-screened but there was time for other places, increasingly farther from the coast and located further south down the coast.