“We were both lying down and my husband was shot.” The early morning of February 14, 2011, Alfonso Trigueroa 51-year-old businessman Logrosan (Cáceres), went to bed after having dinner with his son José Carlos at El Cortijo del Jamon, the restaurant that the man ran with his wife, Rosa. Ana, the youngest daughter of the couple, had left around six in the afternoon for Badajoz, where she was studying. José Carlos waited for his father to fall asleep and went up to his room, where the 28-year-old man opened the lock on him, almost at point-blank range, a shot in the side.
He murdered him, according to the judgment of the Court of Cáceres that sentenced him in 2014 to seventeen and a half years in prisonwith the same shotgun with which the day before he had hunted a wild boar during a hunt, a weapon that his sister’s boyfriend had lent him because his was “jammed” for months. The same prison sentence was imposed by the court for the businessman’s wife, for having participated in her murder along with her son, but the Supreme Court reviewed the case and ended up acquitting her for lack of evidence two years later.
They killed me!
It was the woman, Rosa, who called 112 to report the death of the businessman, who together with his wife ran a sausage dryer, a self-service and a grill for which, in 2010, the Junta de Extremadura awarded a prize to the best rural company: “Oh, everything is mixed up! They’ve killed him, they’ve killed him!”she yelled, pointing to the possibility that someone had broken into her house that night and murdered her husband.
The Civil Guard found the son’s DNA in the rifle. Also gunshot residue on his hands and clothes.
The Civil Guard verified that the door of the home had not been forced, despite this the living room drawers were scrambled. Mother and son claimed that the intruder had stolen an envelope with 4,500 euros from the family business fundraiser over the weekend, but Rosa’s purse and wallet were there, untouched. The only fingerprints that were found on the furniture where the alleged thief would have searched were those of Rosa, and the investigators found no evidence that they had been handled with gloves.
The woman stated that she was in bed with her husband when, around three in the morning, he woke her up “a loud noise”. She ran out into the hall, calling her son, who was sleeping in the opposite room. José Carlos took the shotgun that he kept in his room, along with several boxes of ammunition, and went down to the living room, but his mother asked him to stop. Then he returned the gun to his room, went back downstairs and saw that the front door was open. He went up with his mother to see why Alfonso had not gotten up and together they discovered that he was wounded and that the shotgun used by José Carlos the day before to hunt was at the foot of the bed.
Circulation problems
The investigators were surprised that an intruder entered the house, took a weapon that was already in the home, went to where the businessman slept and murdered him in cold blood with that shotgun. The Civil Guard found evidence that Rosa was not sleeping with her husband that night. There was gunpowder residue on your side of the bed, while his pajamas were clean. Then she changed her version and said that, due to circulation problems, she slept on a mat on the floorfor put your legs up, and assured that he had not told it before “because of shame”. But the truth is that neither her son nor the investigators saw said mat there. Rosa was also unable to explain why her DNA was on the cartridge that ended Alfonso’s life.
José Carlos’s alibi was also dismantled. To justify that his fingerprints were on the trigger of the gun, he said that he had gone hunting with the shotgun and that I hadn’t cleaned it afterwards. According to his own version, other people, including his sister, took the rifle that day, but no DNA other than his own was found.
pajamas under clothes
José Carlos used the same argument to justify the gunshot residue on his clothes and hands. He said that he usually wears the pajamas under the shirt and the pants when he goes hunting. However, several photographs published by the Extremadura association Monteros Battue made it possible to demonstrate in court that the clothes worn by the young man on both days did not match.
The parricide tried another excuse: “I was still filled with gunpowder when I touched my father to plug his wound while the ambulance arrived,” but the experts quickly ruled out this possibility because neither the young man nor his mother got blood, despite the fact that it was plentiful.
“Could be my mother”
In his attempt to explain the causes of his father’s murder, José Carlos pointed to a alleged robbery in the house and even an alleged hitman. A hired killer who would not only have killed the businessman with a shotgun that was found by chance at the victim’s home, but would have entered his son’s room to load the gun, without him waking up and would have left it next to the deceased after committing the crime.
The murderer accused his mother: “She was jealous and I think my father went to brothels. There were two of us, I’m not going to eat this brown”
To support this hypothesis, José Carlos stated that perhaps he and his mother had not noticed the murderer’s appearance because they had been drugged. He and the woman stated that they noticed “a bitter taste in the ColaCao” that she prepared her husband and son. In addition, the parricide said that whoever entered the house used “a slice of choped” to silence the dog and lock him in the bathroom. The Civil Guard found a sausage bar on the kitchen counter that, according to José Carlos and Rosa, was not there before they went to bed.
The parricide has always defended his innocence. There was only one moment when he fell apart. When he found out that he had to enter preventive detention, he tried to sow doubts about his mother: “There were two people there and I was not, I’m not going to eat this brown. I said it had been a robbery because she told me that someone had broken into the house, but apparently my mother could have done it.” In his statement, the young man also contradicted his mother, who described the relationship with her husband as that of an “exemplary marriage”.
Jealousy and whorehouses
The young murderer even suggested a motive for which Rosa would have murdered Alfonso: “My mother I was jealous and I think my father used to go to whorehouses. On one occasion, my sister and I saw a photo of a naked woman on his cell phone.” José Carlos added that he had heard his parents argue several times.
In the same way, he speculated about the possibility that Rosa had fired the weapon, even though she did not know how to handle it, stating that “anyone can shoot with that shotgun” and added that his mother had told him, just a few days before the murder, that I wanted to learn to handle a gun. But later, during the trial, he backed down.
ran away
His excuses did not free him from jail, but the parricide tried to avoid it until the end: when the Court of Cáceres declared him and his mother guilty, both they appealed the sentence before the Superior Court of Justice of Extremadura. The judge concluded that there was no flight risk and released them while waiting for them to dictate their decision. José Carlos took the opportunity to disappear.
Three months later, the Civil Guard detained him 220 kilometers from Logrosán, in Bejar (Salamanca), during a routine control when the murderer was traveling by bus. carried on €7,600.
a life insurance
José Carlos is serving a sentence in the Cáceres prison. In all these years, he has not confessed what led him to end the life of his father. The investigations revealed that the employer had hired a life insurance of 30,000 euros for his wife and children. Also that Rosa asked for a loan of 60,000 euros to a friend of her husband behind his back. She asked him to keep the secret and assured that it was “a matter of life or death”.
Reasons that the businessman’s family has never been convinced of, especially considering that Alfonso had recently helped with an endorsement to his son to set up his business, a machinery company destined to work on the AVE works.
The man lived for his family and for his business, but above all “he was devoted to his children,” according to his family and friends. Before he died, Alfonso excitedly told his brother that he had decided to invest in a new project, he was going to build some rural apartments behind his restaurant, a new investment with which he intended to ensure his son’s future, “in case the machines weren’t doing well.