A 62-year-old man from Veghel has been sentenced to twenty years in prison for killing his elderly mother. According to the court in Den Bosch, it was a cold-blooded murder. The 84-year-old victim was stabbed seven times in the bedroom of her own home in Oss in August 2024.
After the murder, the man, Marcelino B., tried to steal the contents of her safe. And shortly before the fatal stabbing, he had already withdrawn 80,000 euros from his mother’s account without permission.
Defense maintains manslaughter
After a report from concerned relatives, the police found the woman’s body in her apartment on Beethovengaarde in Oss on August 16, 2024. B. was arrested as a suspect a day later, based on traces of blood found. He confessed that he had killed his mother. According to the defense, he did not intend to do this and it was therefore a case of – the legally less serious – manslaughter and not murder.
The court has a very different view on this: the suspect did indeed kill his mother with a premeditated plan. B. got up around midnight on August 15, 2024, grabbed a cap, gloves and a large knife and drove to his mother. When he discovered halfway through that he had forgotten her house key, B. returned to his apartment to retrieve it.
Just before he arrived at the apartment complex where his mother lived, he put on his ‘disguise’. He then opened the door with his mother’s house key and stabbed her to death in the bedroom.
Why does judge assume murder?
The court assumes that B. really had the plan to take his mother’s life on the way to his mother. There was plenty of time to change his mind before he got there, but he chose to kill his mother.
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During the (emotional) hearing of his criminal case, B. said that he wanted to steal his mother’s safe and had taken the knife with him to threaten his mother if necessary. It was only in the house that he allegedly made the decision to kill his mother, when she turned out to be awake.
The court cannot reconcile this scenario with the suspect’s own statement that he immediately, without a word being exchanged, started stabbing his mother when he saw her in the bedroom. It is also not logical that the suspect needed a knife to threaten his elderly mother.
Son is said to have acted in a ‘haze’
B. also said that he had acted ‘in a haze’. That condition was a result of tapering off medication. The judge also saw nothing in this statement.
Besides his mother, B. was the only one who had access to her bank account and he was also the only one to whom his mother entrusted her house key. The suspect abused this trust, according to the court’s opinion. The public prosecutor also ruled it murder and demanded the same sentence (twenty years).
After the discovery of the dead woman, great alarm was raised:
