More than six years have passed since the murder of Valentina C. and the second verdict for this murder will be announced in the coming days. The first was pronounced in September 2020: guilty. The defendant who sat before the judge is the same one who did so now: the victim’s husband, David A. The first time he was taken from prison to the Madrid Provincial Court, on this occasion and due to the time that had passed , He does it of his own accord, like a free man, unless a judgment is passed that deprives him of it again. A comment from the jury speaker at the court doors three years ago ruined everything: “I could see that we had to stay overnight in the hotel. Guilty and everyone goes home.” And he added: “In short, this (the defendant) is not ours.” This change in vote was the deciding factor in David’s conviction.
This arrogant comment ruined the entire process. One of the alternate jurors listened to him and scolded him harshly for his lack of commitment and responsibility. In addition, he went to a notary in the Madrid municipality of Galapagar to certify what had just happened. With this document he appeared before the judge presiding over the court in this case and, finding no irregularities in the written report presented to him by the jury, he finally announced a verdict days later: 21 years in prison. The regional court did not consider it had the authority to open an investigation to clarify the alleged incident. To implement this, the members of the jury would have had to explain the reasons for the annulment in the minutes they submitted to the judge. Statements were never made to the other jury members, including the alleged author of the comment.
However, the judge advised the defendant’s defense that they could rely on the notarial transcript in their appeal. Something the lawyer did. The Madrid Supreme Court (TSJM) annulled the trial six months later and ordered a rehearing. “We assume that someone who goes to the notary and gives such detailed explanations as recorded in the record is aware of the seriousness of the fact that one of the jurors has commented on in a hurry to convict,” says the TSJM decision. In this way, Valentina’s crime was kept in the closet for three more years, until this week. A few months after the annulment of the first trial, David was released from prison because the maximum period of preventive detention had expired and the daughter he had with Valentina returned to him, as he himself explained in the repeated verdict oral opinion. The girl is now 12 years old.
Valentina C., the victim of Collado Villalba’s crime.
In most proceedings, the defendants confess to the facts at the hearing and the defense strategy is usually to obtain a reduced sentence or an acquittal. In this case, David never admitted to killing his wife, something the Civil Guard and the prosecution have no doubt about. In addition, they believe that David sexually abused her before the murder, which is why the State Department is requesting a permanent, reviewable prison sentence, since this is one of the cases considered with this sentence. The prosecutor is also seeking a 30-year restraining order against her daughter. “She knows why I’m here, I’ve never hidden it from her,” the defendant explained in his statement at the hearing.
The new jury will have to decide which version to believe about what happened behind the doors of the chalet the couple lived in in Collado Villalba. On May 26, 2017, a Friday, David and Valentina ended their work day at their company, a mechanical workshop, and went for a beer with colleagues. The woman was 37 years old when she was murdered, the couple had been married for three years, she was Romanian but had lived in Spain for many years. She had two other children from a previous relationship and her husband, another. Things dragged on and eventually they had dinner at a restaurant they had gone to earlier and had drinks after dinner. It was a celebratory day because the couple had just decided on a house they wanted to buy. At around a quarter to two the evening ended and the couple returned home. Her daughter spent that night at a friend’s house. That is the common story.
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The prosecution claims that when they returned home at dawn, David wanted to have sexual relations with Valentina, but she did not. One of the key pieces of evidence supporting this account is that the victim had two wounds on her thighs, which the forensic experts who conducted the autopsy defined as “very characteristic” of a “sexual assault.” These are the thumb and index finger prints on both thighs, a sign that a violent penetration attempt has taken place. “It is clear that this woman was fighting for her life,” said the coroner, who went to the crime scene address.
According to the most likely version, the woman suffered a head injury in the fight that could have altered her consciousness. According to this story, when the attack was over, David suffocated his wife to prevent her from betraying him. He wrapped her body from the waist down, bound her hands and legs with silver tape, gagged her mouth and put a bag over her head. The next morning he visited a cafeteria and a motorcycle race track, made a final stop to have coffee at a hostel, and when he got home he alerted 112 that he had found his wife dead in the bedroom: “You have” They broke in to steal and murdered my wife.
David A. left the hostel where he was drinking coffee the day his wife’s body was found.
To the Guardia Civil, this entire morning excursion was a ploy by David to stay away from home for enough hours to justify that his chalet had been robbed and the thief had murdered his wife. “You can count on the fingers of one hand the cases in which the thieves gagged the residents, and besides, they did not choose a Saturday to enter,” said the Civil Guard, which conducted the investigation. They were so clear that he was arrested after Valentina’s funeral that same Sunday, two days after the murder. Officers found no signs of forced locks or trampled plants under the windows. They also found the house unsearched and the woman wearing a watch and a ring on her wrist and hand. Civil Guard homicide investigators also did not consider it logical that David showered in a hotel near his home after returning from the motorcycle race track, and they assume that this action was aimed at eliminating DNA evidence. Nevertheless, they took photos of the defendant when they saw that he had scratches on his wrists and back.
The appearance of the forensic experts involved in the removal of the body and the autopsy, as well as the appearance of another expert hired by David’s defense, took more than six hours. According to the forensic experts’ report, Valentina died between four and six in the morning. According to the other expert, this range may be larger and it cannot be ruled out that the victim was murdered later than eight in the morning, when David left the house. The defense and accusations of the lawyer Fernando Doria and the Community of Madrid put pressure on the doctors. Getting Valentina to talk about her injuries through forensics will be crucial to the jury’s decision. Images of the body were projected throughout the session, including that of a round pendant found under Valentina’s head because the chain holding it broke in the attack. Neither family members of the victim nor the defendant took part in the negotiations.
The defense insisted on the existence of unidentified fingerprints and the disappearance of the victim’s cell phone to offer an alternative version. In a detailed final report that lasted two hours, lawyer Manuel Alonso fully supported David’s version. They are clinging to the discovery of three fingerprints of an unknown man on the tape used to tie up the victim. “Man one,” the lawyer emphasized urgently, “this is the real perpetrator of the murder.” This attacker, the defense claimed, knew Valentina and had met her that morning to rob her house because he knew that Couple had large amounts of cash in the cabin. “After the crime was committed, he stole the woman’s phone because it contained evidence that she had met him at home that morning,” he said. “They wanted to have another child and wanted to buy a house. What were the reasons for killing her?,” he added.
The lawyer mentioned the case of Rocío Wanninkhof, for whose murder Dolores Vázquez was wrongly convicted. He also caught the jury’s attention by measuring the width of David’s hand with a ruler to prove that the marks on Valentina’s thighs were not his hand, such as when trying on American football player OJ Simpson before the Court. He insulted the gloves found at his wife’s crime scene to prove that they didn’t fit him.
The meticulous prosecutor Victoria Bonilla based her accusation on ten points, for which she is demanding the highest possible punishment in the Spanish legal system. In his opinion, these prints simply represent contamination of the crime scene and he emphasized that David’s DNA was found under the victim’s nails. “Valentina cannot be brought back to life, but justice can be done,” he concluded. For the second time.
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