Laura Hidalgo was woken up on Sunday morning by a call from her daughter’s friend, DJ Valentina Trespalacios, who told her the 23-year-old woman was dead and that a street resident had found her body in a garbage can. His body had been left there in a suitcase with signs of asphyxiation. At first, Hidalgo did not believe in such macabre news: maybe it was fraud, maybe a mix-up, he thought. She imagined her daughter being happy with the boyfriend she had just moved in with. But Valentina’s friend assured her that he found out about the death from the police, who informed him about what was happening in the town of Fontibón, west of Bogotá, from the street resident.
Laura Hidalgo then began sending WhatsApp messages to the young woman. “Daughter, answer, answer,” she pleaded. Silence. She asked one of her sons to also try to contact her. He didn’t answer either. As the hours went by, it became clear that it wasn’t a scam. Although Colombian authorities are still investigating the murder, the family have explained the various leads that point to them a single suspect: John Poulos, Valentina’s boyfriend, a US citizen with whom young Trespalacios had a relationship for less than a year A relationship.
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The first and main suspicion for the family is that Poulos shut down his social networks and left the country shortly after Valentina’s death. You haven’t heard from him since Sunday. Hidalgo told various media that the boyfriend had been in Bogotá for a week and had promised the young artist to move in together. On Friday night, Valentina sent Laura a video where she looked happy in a car with Poulos as she brought her belongings to the new apartment. On Saturday evening, Valentina called her younger brother via video and showed him that she was happy in the new apartment with her partner.
After Hidalgo received the news on Sunday morning, he asked one of his sons to contact Poulus on Instagram and WhatsApp. There they saw that the man had blocked the family’s numbers and later closed his Instagram account. “We didn’t know how to communicate with him and that’s why I’m saying he’s the first suspect,” the mother said on the radio. “He was with her at midnight on Saturday, he was the last person to see her alive. In my heart, as a mother, I know that he is responsible for my daughter’s death,” he added.
Two days later, in another interview, Hidalgo confirmed that the authorities know that John Poulos is no longer in Colombia. “The police say he left the country,” he said. Police are currently offering 20 million Colombian pesos to anyone with information about the murder by Valentina Trespalacios.
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The second suspicion stems from Poulos’ attitude towards Valentina, which the family describes as obsessive. According to Hidalgo and his relatives, the boyfriend was a controlling and jealous man who hired a private investigator to track Valentina’s movements last December. The pair had a falling out, briefly ending the relationship, but Poulos vowed he would change his ways.
“He presented himself as an obsessive man at that moment,” Hidalgo told radio station La FM. “And I said to my daughter, ‘Daughter, if this man did this, he’s capable of anything, you can put your family and your life on the line,’ but my daughter believed in him.” that this attitude also makes him the prime suspect. “In a fit of jealousy, he took my daughter’s life,” says the mother.
The third suspicion comes from a testimony from Caracol Televisión with a driver of the InDriver platform. Without revealing his identity, he says he picked up Valentina and John in his car early Saturday morning. He says the young DJ tried to make him aware of the danger to life. “As she gets in the car before he gets in, she screams and says to me, ‘Oh, why did I write that?'” he says. She says she showed a message from her to the InDriver platform that said, “Help, I’m in danger.” The driver asks if she’s okay, but at that moment Poulos gets in the car and she replies Not. The driver does his job and, at his direction, takes them to a nightclub, where they arrive around 4am.
If it is confirmed that the murder was committed under family suspicion, the case of Valentina Trespalacios would be one of the first feminicide cases in the country, with some estimated to have committed five and others nine in January. Last year, in 2022, Colombian prosecutors investigated about 180 cases of murdering women as femicides, although organizations like the Colombian Femicide Observatory, a civil society initiative, say there were 612 over the course of the year.
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