by Guilty without a doubt. The popular jury court has considered proven with a majority of 8 votes in favor and 1 against that Mari Carmen BG killed her partner Salvador V. by poisoning him with a massive amount of laxatives that … caused chronic diarrhea. The victim died of multiple organ failure as a result of septic shock due to poisoning from these medications. After the verdict, the magistrate has requested that he be placed in provisional detention pending sentencing.
The accused had one purpose: to seize all the man’s money. During the six months that Salvador was admitted to the IMED hospital in Burjassot, the accused made up to 155 bank withdrawals worth 88,000 euros and spent nearly 32,000 with the Gold Visa. She also requested two loans of 10,000 and 3,000 euros in the name of the victim. As the prosecution lawyer Víctor González has detailed, “in six months he defrauded nearly 140,000 euros.” The jury has also considered it proven that Mari Carmen committed a crime of continuous fraud and another crime of document falsification.
Following the guilty verdict handed down this Tuesday, the defendant faces a sentence, as claimed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, of 28 years in prison for the crimes of murder, fraud and document falsification. The private accusations raised their request to 31 years in prison, understanding that the maximum sentence should be imposed “given that we appreciate the circumstance that he killed Salvador in order to keep his money,” explained the other lawyer for the private prosecution representing the son of the deceased, Andrés Zapata. The defense has already expressed its willingness to appeal and request the minimum sentence for these three crimes while throughout the trial it requested the acquittal of her client.
After the guilty verdict, the accusations have demanded that the Court order provisional detention for the defendant, who was on provisional release throughout the trial. Zapata has declared: «It was a decision that was adopted at the time. Once she was arrested, it seems that she did not have time to finish the proceedings because they were very numerous and it was decided not to exhaust the 72 hours because it would not be possible to bring her to justice and her provisional release was agreed.
The verdict has been a message of relief for Salvador’s relatives. At the end of this last hearing, they hugged each other at the doors of the Jury Court, saying to each other: “Now we can breathe.” His wish was that Mari Carmen would not go unpunished for her actions. Apparently, she repeated this formula with her previous partner who, in a phone call, admitted to the police that while they were together she also suffered from diarrhea for three months.
This Monday afternoon the jury issued the guilty verdict against Mari Carmen BG, 58 years old, considering the facts collected by the prosecutor Vicente Devesa in his qualification letter, as confirmed by sources of the procedure. Now it will be the court that sets the sentence.
Around ten in the morning, the magistrate delivered the verdict to the members of the jury with a battery of questions to which they answered to determine that Mari Carmen is guilty.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the accused “knew very well what she did and the profitability of what she did until the final result”, so in the presentation of her report she asked the jury to do “justice” and convict her, because it is of an “especially treacherous and very serious crime: in the seven months that Salvador was admitted, he saw how it was consumed and continued. “It’s unbearably chilling.” Devesa added: “She killed Salvador knowing what he was doing, giving him laxatives and taking his money.”
Lawyer Andres Zapata, who exercises one of the private accusations, pointed out that the accused is a “predator who has perfected her method over time (an ex-boyfriend testified that she emptied his accounts while he had diarrhea for three months) in which the deceased had no type of opportunity. “Please stop it,” he demanded to the jury.
However, the defense maintained throughout the trial that the story of the accusations is “an excellent film, but it is not based on real events,” because “the murder weapon, the laxatives, has not been found, nor in the autopsy nor in the reports. He also stated that authorship has not been proven, because no one saw Mari Carmen “administer laxatives to Salvador.” The accused did not want to use her right to the last word.
“The compatibility of diarrhea with laxatives is only a possibility, but it cannot be a reason to convict Mari Carmen of murder,” said the defense lawyer, when she also pointed out that it was proven that she was administered laxatives in the hospital itself. Furthermore, the doctors who performed the autopsy reported that they found no trace of these medications in the victim’s body since they are absorbed by the body itself and are “practically impossible to detect in urine, blood and hair analysis.”
At all times the prosecution denied the crimes of fraud and falsehood, demanding the free acquittal of the accused, who until the trial has been on provisional release. He insisted that Mari Carmen had Salvador’s “verbal” authorization to use his cards, and pointed out that if there had been an embezzlement it could have been his “own will” before entering, because “he was in love with Mari Carmen or because the pot had eaten him.
The facts investigated
After starting a romantic relationship with Salvador in 2019, the accused began “a process of alienation”, the purpose of which was to separate Salvador from his family, according to Andrés Zapata. In March 2020, coinciding with the confinement due to the pandemic, Mari Carmen stayed to live in Paterna at the home of the victim, who until then lived with her daughter and her granddaughter.
The alienation process worsened during the summer, causing her relatives to leave the house in the month of August, and from that moment and once she was alone in the house with the victim, she began to buy up to 2,000 laxative products (Evacuol , Dulcolaxo and Seguril), which he administered to Salvador, just as he had done with another previous couple, without his romantic partner realizing it.
Salvador had been diagnosed with several medical disorders, was hospitalized in September of the same year and spent four days in the intensive care unit. Upon returning home, Mari Carmen, according to the prosecutor’s account, continued to give her laxatives, which caused the victim to be admitted again and she continued to administer the drugs even though she was aware that they could cause her death. During the time of her hospitalization until her death, she purchased more than a thousand Dulcolaxo tablets, more than 500 units of Evacuol and another 500 of Seguril.
The victim developed chronic functional diarrhea refractory to any treatment and progressive dehydration and deterioration until he died on April 16, 2021 from multiple organ failure caused by severe septic shock. Salvador was 69 years old when he died.
Furthermore, between October 2020 and until the man’s death, the defendant would have made up to 152 withdrawals of money from the victim’s checking accounts and purchases with the man’s credit cards worth more than 120,000 euros. She would also have requested two loans in the name of the patient, which she would have signed over the telephone, simulating the man’s intervention.
Mari Carmen’s ex-partner also testified at trial that while he was with her he suffered massive diarrhea that lasted up to three months. The man, who did not want to report her, assured that when they broke up the relationship she recovered from the illness. Furthermore, while he was ill he made withdrawals from his card of almost 20,000 euros. The witness defended: “I didn’t ask him to give them back to me.”
