Glenn Wickman
AN 18-year-old man has been sentenced to two years in prison for assisting in the suicide of his stepfather in what has become known as ‘the Godelleta crime’.
On June 19, 41-year-old Beatriu was arrested and charged with the murder of her husband after faking his disappearance for seven months, even sending mobile phone messages to the victim’s relatives pretending to be him and claiming he had left voluntarily.
The body of Isaac Guillen, a 45-year-old retired Local Police officer suffering from a severe degenerative disease, had been discovered days earlier buried in a hole in the outskirts of Godelleta (Hoya de Buñol, Valencia Province).
An autopsy revealed that Isaac had been put to sleep with a tranquiliser tablet before being strangled and dumped in a hole on a plot of farmland.
It seems Beatriu first tried to suffocate the victim by pumping gas into the car, but when that failed to work she allegedly told her son, who was present at the time, to hand over his shoelaces before using them to throttle Isaac from the backseat.
The victim had been reported as missing in November 2020, since when his wife had allegedly done everything she could to throw investigators off the trail and prepare her own alibi.
But seven months later, police investigators discovered the body after spotting the victim’s wheelchair next to the burial site and arrested the mother and son, remanding Beatriu in custody awaiting trial and detaining the then underage son in a minors’ detention centre.
In the trial this week, the judge ruled that the young man, who was 17 at the time of the crime last November, actively collaborated in the death.
However, it was also ascertained that he merely obeyed orders from his mother, who reportedly threatened to hand him over to the authorities as the sole culprit if he refused.
In addition, it was found that the son had been convinced by Beatriu that Isaac wanted to die due to the intense pain caused by the incurable and degenerative disease the victim suffered.
As a result, the son was found guilty of assisting suicide instead of murder.
Investigators are now working to ascertain whether Beatriu acted on Isaac’s true wish for euthanasia, or out of economic greed.
The case continues.
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