Michael Coy
THE Supreme Court has today (Monday May 5) ruled that the controversial civil case against the ex-king is ‘legally dead’, with no fresh evidence to back up claims of wrongdoing.
The Public Prosecutor dropped the case three years ago, but furious lawyers launched a class action to force his hand. No dice. Juan Carlos walks free. Again.
Dubbed ‘the luckiest man alive’ by critics, some say only Donald Trump rivals him in legal escapology. And that’s not even the half of it.
It’s not often talked about, but he killed his own brother – and was never seriously investigated for it.
You could say he has led a charmed life.
Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias, to give him his full name, was born in 1938 (he’s now 87 years old) in exile.
Six years before his birth, his grandfather had abdicated, and most Spaniards assumed that the Madrid Monarchy was finished. However, Franco became dictator, and he liked old-fashioned ‘posh’ notions like kingship.
Juan Carlos’s father was next in line, but waved his son through – so Juan Carlos benefitted from another fluke, and became Franco’s heir.
We all know that he became king on Franco’s demise in 1975, and faced down an anti-democratic rebellion in 1981 (though some say he held back until 1am before speaking, and would have gone along with the uprising if he could).
He has survived a whole range of scandals, including buying jewellery for his mistress Corinna and shooting endangered animals on safari, but the death of his brother is rarely mentioned.
On March 29, 1956 the Spanish royal family was still living in exile in Estoril, Portugal. Prince Alfonso, who was 14 years old, won a golf competition that morning.
READ MORE: Disgraced ex-King of Spain Juan Carlos will not face new tax probe
At half past eight that evening, the family doctor arrived in a hurry to treat Alfonso. He would end up certifying that the child died from a gunshot wound to the head.
Apparently, Alfonso and his 18-year-old brother, Juan, had been playing with a .22-caliber revolver, in the game room of the villa. The gun went off.
To this day, nobody knows exactly what happened.
“The most absolute silence will surround the details of that fateful event: it’s a mystery, it can only be the subject of hypotheses,” writes Laurence Debray, the authorised biographer of Juan Carlos.
There are up to five different versions of what happened that night.
British historian Paul Preston has collected them in his book, Juan Carlos, A People’s King (2003).
On Friday, March 30, 1956, the dictator Francisco Franco ordered the Spanish embassy in Lisbon to issue the following statement: “While His Highness the Infante Alfonso was cleaning a revolver with his brother, a shot was fired that hit his forehead and killed him.”
However, the Italian press published a very different version, stating that Juan Carlos was holding the gun and that his finger was on the trigger when the fatal shot was fired.
In her autobiography, the Countess of Barcelona (their mother) neither denied nor confirmed that Juan was holding the pistol.
She apparently revealed to her dressmaker, Josefina Carolo, that her eldest son jokingly aimed the revolver at his younger brother and, without realising that the gun was loaded, pulled the trigger.
Juan Carlos told a similar version of this to Bernardo Arnoso, a Portuguese friend. However, he added a detail: according to him, the bullet had bounced off a wall and hit his little brother’s face.
The Count of Barcelona (their father) ran up to the playroom where Alfonso was lying in a pool of his own blood, and that he tried to revive his son. The child died in his arms.
Recently, a more scandalous version has circulated, passed around by another member of European royalty.
“I was there. We were [also] in exile, and we used to shoot jars and bottles on the beach in Cascais. Juanito shot his brother and killed him,” recalls Prince Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, son of the last king of Italy, in the new Netflix documentary series, The King Who Never Was.
“He didn’t shoot him directly but through the closet,” he clarifies. “I was there. It was 100% an accident.”
The absence of a judicial investigation into the death of Alfonso has generated all kinds of speculation for nearly seven decades.
Alfonso was buried in the Cascais cemetery on March 31, 1956. After the ceremony, his father picked up the pistol and threw it into the ocean.
Juan Carlos has never spoken publicly about this episode of his life, but almost 70 years later, the ghost of Alfonso de Borbón continues to haunt the ex-king.
