He didn't let her finish, he told her she was worthless, he called her useless, a black whore, and he didn't even allow her to wear cologne. Alice suffered for years from threats from her husband in Portugal, where they were originally from, and remained in Spain, where they had settled years before. They lived in a house in Majadahonda (Madrid), he worked as a scrap dealer. Something changed in February 2021. Perhaps due to the fact that her five children were already grown and almost all of them had become independent, she felt that she could no longer bear it. She told him that things had to change. Early in the morning of February 14th she went to sleep and he followed her because he wanted to argue and fight. She told him that she was tired and that they would talk the next day. A few minutes after entering the bedroom, he grabbed a gun he had bought on the black market and shot her. The 52-year-old woman bled to death in the street while one of her daughters fought to avoid becoming her father's second fatality that night.
The Madrid Provincial Court has just sentenced the defendant to 25 years in prison for the murder of the woman, the attempted murder of her daughter, illegal possession of weapons and threats. The reality reflected in the verdict to which EL PAIS had access is absolute terror. The investigation reveals a man who was jealous even of his own children, someone who constantly threatened the entire family with death, an insecure nature that subjugated everyone who lived with him. Alice, the target of all his attacks, endured and even hid them, downplaying her harshness in front of her loved ones.
“She had to obey, she spoke to him lovingly, she tried to calm us down so we wouldn't worry,” one of the daughters said at the hearing. “When he was in front it wasn’t the same. When she was there, everyone was scared, panicked, they thought she might hit them, kill them.” “She was jealous of her children because she said they had cost her time,” the verdict says. He chased one of them down the street with an axe. “I treated her like a piece of human garbage, I didn't even let her call me darling, she protected us all her life,” explained the only male child, whose father was 62 at the time of the crime, particularly hated . A week before the murder, another found her mother with her father's fingermarks on her neck.
The woman separated from her killer in 2018 and went to Portugal and then France with two of her children. However, he had to return due to threats from Joao, who kept writing to him telling him that he would murder the part of the family that remained in Madrid. “If you hadn’t come back, I would have killed you all,” he told them shortly before the crime. He only allowed him to travel to his homeland on the condition that they stopped in the countryside on the way back, he tied his mother to a tree and everyone saw him beat her. Everyone knew he had a gun that he regularly cleaned and moved around the house to scare them all. “Your mother is going on a trip from which she will never come back,” the man would sometimes say over dinner.
The day of the crime
The day Joao murdered his wife, he made one of his last threats. “Some of these people only have a few hours left to live,” he said. Three of his daughters, two sons-in-law and his grandchildren were in the house. One of them insisted that her mother call the police. As always, she tried to calm her down: “Don't worry, he's upset today because I had surgery and he didn't want me to have surgery, so he's more upset than usual.” The woman had undergone cataract surgery. In the afternoon, two daughters and their husbands left the house, leaving only Alice, Joao and the one who still lived with them. The girl's exchange of messages with her boyfriend reflects the escalation until the father completed the sexist murder.
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“Here, good,” she writes at three in the afternoon. “He's awake now and it looks like he wants to argue,” he types around eleven in the evening. The anxiety increases as the conversation progresses. “God won’t protect you if that guy shoots you twice,” her friend replies. He asks her to get out of there. “Yes, but when my mother is healthy again,” replies the daughter. After midnight, the girl texts her partner that she is going to sleep, but leaves the door open. As she told the trial, it was normal for her to remain vigilant in her parents' bedroom in case her mother needed help. “This has appeared again,” the daughter types at 00:32. At 00:50 the friend asks the girl to answer him. Since this doesn't happen, he goes home ten minutes later.
Joao had just shot Alice and her daughter had come into the room to stop him. The woman managed to escape out the door while the father choked inside the house and stabbed his daughter, banging her head against the wall several times and shooting her in the thigh. She also escaped her father and went to the sidewalk, where a neighbor came out to help them and called emergency services. In the minutes it took for paramedics to arrive, Alice kept repeating, “He killed me, he shot me, I'm dead.”
Telephone 016 supports victims of sexist violence, their families and their environment 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 53 different languages. The number will not be registered on the phone bill, but the call must be deleted from the device. You can also contact them by email at [email protected] and by WhatsApp at 600 000 016. Minors can contact the ANAR Foundation at 900 20 20 10. If it is an emergency you can call 112 or the telephone numbers of the National Police (091) and the Civil Guard (062). And if you can't call, you can use the ALERTCOPS application, from which an alarm signal with geolocation will be sent to the police.
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