Walter Finch
The case of the woman whose headless and handless body washed up next to a group of Sunday diners in Marbella has been solved after her ex-boyfriend confessed to the gruesome crime.
A Colombian national, 45, and an accomplice friend after the former confessed to police after being presented with the overwhelming evidence against him.
The body, difficult to identify due to the removal of the identifying parts, was seen in videos on social media by a woman who feared it may belong to her missing sister, a 46-year-old Colombian woman.
The missing woman had broken up with an abusive ex-boyfriend in November, taking out a restraining order against him after he resorted to threats and harassment.
Police arrested the ex-boyfriend on Monday for violating the restraining order in the days before her disappearance.
Meanwhile a DNA test to identify if the body belongs to the missing Colombian woman is underway.
But in the intervening period, the two cases remained as separate investigations, until the ex-boyfriend dramatically confessed to police at a Marbella police station today and later before a judge to murdering her and dismembering her body.
The police had carried out a reconstruction of the crime based at a point along the Marbella coast not far from the beach of Las Cañas where the corpse was discovered.
When presented with the evidence against him, he broke down and confessed to police in the station.
He later told the judge that he and a friend took the ex-partner, while still alive, to an enclave on the Marbella coast in the back of a van on Sunday afternoon.
There, he murdered her, cut off her head, and then her hands, and disembowelled her, before throwing the corpse into the sea.
The friend was arrested on Wednesday as a co-perpetrator who drove the van, which was discovered and impounded in Madrid.
Once the family of the missing woman had reported their fears to the police, a team was put together to find and arrest the ex-boyfriend, initially for violating the restraining order.
He was arrested in the early hours of January 9, while police carried out searches of his home and the missing woman’s.
Witness testimony placed the suspect and the missing woman in the same location on Sunday.
The pair had been involved in a five-month relationship that ended in November after the suspect was reported to have been abusive.
It was then that the threats and harassment began, leading to the murdered woman taking out the restraining order.
Should the DNA test confirm the identity of the woman, as expected, the crime will mark the fifth murder of a woman at the hands of her male partner in just the first twelve days of 2023.
It would also be the second in Andalucia in less than two weeks after another woman was killed by her partner in El Puerto de Santa María, in Cádiz.
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