He didn't let her get ready, he told her she was worthless, he called her useless, a black whore, and he didn't even allow her to wear cologne. Alice suffered years of threats from her husband, in Portugal, where they were originally from, and continued in Spain, where they had settled years ago. They lived in a house in Majadahonda (Madrid), he worked as a scrap metal dealer. In February 2021, something changed. Perhaps due to the fact that her five children were already grown and almost all of them had become independent, she felt that she could not take it anymore. She told him that things had to change. In the early morning of February 14, she went to sleep, he followed her because she wanted to argue, fight. She told him that she was tired, that they would talk the next day. A few minutes after entering the bedroom, he grabbed a gun she had bought on the black market and shot her. The 52-year-old woman bled to death in the street, while one of her daughters fought to avoid becoming her father's second fatality that night.
The Provincial Court of Madrid has just sentenced the accused to 25 years in prison for the murder of the woman, the attempt to kill her daughter, the illegal possession of weapons and the threats. The reality reflected in the sentence to which EL PAIS has had access is absolute terror. The investigation shows a man jealous even of his own children, someone who constantly threatened the entire family with death, an insecure being who subjugated everyone who lived with him. Alice, the target of all of his attacks, endured them and even hid them and downplayed their severity in front of her loved ones.
“She had to obey, she spoke to him lovingly, she tried to calm us down so we wouldn't worry,” said one of the daughters at the oral hearing. “It wasn't the same when he was in front. When he was there, everyone was afraid, panicked, they thought he could hit them, kill them,” “he was jealous of her children because he said they took away his time from being with her,” the sentence states. He chased one of them down the street with an axe. “He treated her like human remains, she didn't even let him call me darling, she has protected us all our lives,” explained the only male child, to whom the father, 62 years old at the time of the crime, I especially hated it. A week before the murder, another of her found her mother with her father's fingers marked on her neck.
The woman separated from her murderer in 2018 and went with two of her children to Portugal and then to France. But she had to return due to threats from Joao, who kept writing to her telling her that she was going to murder the part of the family that had stayed in Madrid. “If you hadn't come back, I would have killed you all,” she told them shortly before the crime. She only allowed him to travel to her native country on the condition that on the return trip they stopped in the countryside, she tied her mother to a tree and everyone saw how she hit her. Everyone knew that he had a gun, which he cleaned and moved around the house regularly to scare them all. “Your mother is going on a trip from which she will never return,” the man would sometimes say while they were eating.
The day of the crime
The day Joao murdered his wife, he made one of his last threats. “Some of those here have only a few hours to live,” he said. In the house were three of his daughters, two sons-in-law and his grandchildren. One of them insisted her mother call the police. She, as always, tried to calm her down: “Don't worry, he's upset today because I had surgery and he didn't want me to have surgery, so he's more upset than normal.” The woman had undergone cataract surgery. In the afternoon, two daughters and their husbands left the house, leaving only Alice, Joao and the one who still lived with them. The girl's exchange of messages with her boyfriend reflects the escalation until her father completed the sexist murder.
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“Here, good,” she writes at three in the afternoon. “She's up now and it looks like she wants to argue,” she types at almost eleven at night. The anguish increases as the conversation progresses. “God is not going to protect you if he shoots you twice,” her boyfriend answers. He asks her to get out of there. “Yes, but when my mother recovers,” the daughter answers. After midnight, the girl writes to her partner that she is going to sleep, but that she leaves the door open. As she recounted at her trial, it was normal for her to keep an eye on her parents' bedroom, in case her mother needed help from her. “This one came up again,” the daughter types at 00:32. At 00:50 the boyfriend asks the girl to answer him. Since this does not happen, ten minutes later she goes to the home.
Joao had just shot Alice and her daughter had entered the room to stop him. The woman managed to get out the door, while her father choked and stabbed her daughter inside the house, hit her head against the wall several times and shot her in the thigh. She also got away from her father and went out to the sidewalk, where a neighbor came out to help them and called the emergency services. In the minutes it took for the paramedics to arrive, Alice kept repeating: “She killed me, she shot me, I'm dead.”
Telephone 016 assists victims of sexist violence, their families and those around them 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 53 different languages. The number is not registered on the telephone bill, but the call must be deleted from the device. You can also contact via email [email protected] and by WhatsApp at the number 600 000 016. Minors can contact the ANAR Foundation telephone number 900 20 20 10. If it is an emergency situation, you can call 112 or the National Police telephone numbers (091) and the Civil Guard (062). And if you cannot call, you can use the ALERTCOPS application, from which an alert signal is sent to the Police with geolocation.
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