The Alicante Provincial Court has sentenced a woman accused of shooting dead an eighty-year-old British woman in a house in Elche to fifteen years in prison. The ruling was issued after a jury found the accused guilty of the murder that took place on May 4, 2022.
The defendant’s young son was also accused of the same murder, but he was not tried because he died in a traffic accident on the AP7 in Campoamor a day before the date on which the hearing had been scheduled in the juvenile court.
See also: Killer of British Woman dies in Campoamor car crash
The accused admitted to having committed the murder on the day the trial began but then remained silent throughout the investigation, invoking her right not to testify. Since the moment of her arrest, two days after the murder, she has been in preventive detention.
Following her confession, the question that remained was what sentence should be imposed, described by the judge as a “brutal and ruthless” crime with “absolute disregard for the victim”, an eighty-year-old British woman who was defenceless in her home. However, the judge, Gracia Serrano, who presided over the jury, valued both the absence of previous convictions of the accused, as well as the late collaboration with Justice to apply mitigating circumstances in her sentencing.
The judge opted for the sentence requested by the Prosecutor’s Office, which reduced the sentence requested for the murder from 25 to 15 years, taking into account the accused’s collaboration with Justice.
The defence attorney, Joaquín de Lacy, estimated that the reduction should have been greater, up to twelve and a half years in prison, since without the confession of the accused there would be no evidence to prove her guilt, however the judge supported the Public Prosecutor’s Office plea, considering it the most appropriate to the seriousness of the facts.
The events occurred in May 2022 after the accused, a real estate agent from Alicante, showed up at the home of the victim, a British pensioner living in the Torre Azul urbanization in the Maitino area of Elche and ended her life with three shots, one of them to the head from close range.
The motive for the crime has never been established, although everything indicates that the accused must had some real estate arrangement with the victim. The defendant admitted at trial that she killed her, but said she did not know why she did it. She said she lost her mind which could have been a psychotic outbreak, although she has never previously been diagnosed with any mental illness.
The Prosecutor’s Office maintains that there was premeditation because on the morning of the crime the defendant went to buy the gloves at a store specialising in sportswear and decided not to take her son to school, who was then 16 years old, so that he could accompany her to the house where the events occurred. The two of them tried to clean the house and remove evidence, getting rid of the clothes and gloves they were wearing. The murder weapon was an Olympic shooting pistol registered to the defendant which she also tried to get rid of.
Later that night she set fire to the vehicle after dousing it with three canisters of petrol. The flames affected eight other cars that were parked nearby in the residential area on San Juan beach.
For this fire, the prosecution was demanding another three years, although it reduced this to three months in prison, taking into account both the confession of the accused and the fact that she paid compensation to the one car owner who was not covered by insurance.
