As for responsibility for stealing the victims’ car and cards, Mónica said she never returned to the farm. “It was Fernando who went there and brought the car and the cards. I have nothing to do with that”, explaining that this happened because the couple “had a debt” for the four days they had worked on the farm. “Fernando killed himself while working there”, she said, in an expression that one of the judges said was not very happy for a couple being judged.
Fernando and Mónica are accused of having killed, on April 16, 2023, the German couple Jan Otton, aged 79, and Ilse Ediltraud, aged 71, who had welcomed them at Quinta do Paraíso Janedi, in Baleizão, municipality of Beja , The bodies of the septuagenarian couple were only discovered on May 10 of that year, after an alert from the victims’ son, who was unable to contact his parents.
The GNR went to the scene and as the residents showed no signs of life, they informed 112, who called the firefighters “to open the door”, discovering the bodies in an advanced state of decomposition inside the house.
The defendants were arrested on May 12, 2023, in Aljustrel, by inspectors from the Southern Directorate of the Judiciary Police, and the following day they were present for their first interrogation, before a Criminal Investigation Judge of the Beja Court, who applied to them the preventive detention.
