A thousand kilometers separate Castelldefels, in Barcelona, from the small Orense village of Cortegada. A considerable distance, but non-existent in the virtual world, which allowed Cristina and José María to meet one summer night thanks to a dating application. “A fun way to find and connect with new people”, » reads the slogan of the application in which the Catalan and the Galician started a relationship. She is 26 years old and has a daughter whose custody is entrusted to her father. He, a 53-year-old man, also the father of a daughter, took early retirement due to visual impairment and shared a house with his mother. The exchange of messages between each other during these summer days was intense.and it didn’t take long for them to move from the dating portal to private messaging. The relationship grew in leaps and bounds – on screen – and just a week after the first greeting, Cristina encouraged her date to visit her. On August 20, 2021, eleven days after first contact, José María boarded a plane who traveled the route from Barcelona and Vigo and stood in front of the girl, who went to pick him up and installed him in the single-family house of O Rabiño, where she had lived alone since the separation from her previous partner.
The first days in Galicia everything went well. The couple went out to dinner and spent time together. Some local residents even remember seeing them at the municipal swimming pool. But the apparent harmony quickly broke down. Three days after this first meeting on the field, the atmosphere began to become tense and the end of José María was hasty.. The arguments between the premature couple intensified and Cristina, disenchanted with the situation and with the man next to her, asked him to collect his things and return to Barcelona. The woman explained, in her defense, that she had stopped loving him. Faced with her insistence, he told her that he would not leave, that he loved her, that he was in love and that his idea was to settle there. It was even transferred to PlayStationshe explained, a sign – perhaps – that this was going to last a long time. He had also purchased a coffee maker for the house. An acquisition, a priori innocent, that Cristina interpreted as a declaration of intentions for the life as a couple that José María envisaged and which triggered their last and definitive argument.
From doctor to mayor
According to the tax thesis based on the investigations of the Armed Institute, on an undetermined date between August 23 and 24, 2021, The accused “premeditated” gave his lover a deadly cocktail and suffocated him with a pillow. The autopsy revealed that in the victim’s body there were traces of a hypnotic called Zolpidem and an antidepressant that had been prescribed to Cristina and which had managed to numb José María “until he lost consciousness.” Then, the girl consulted her doctor at Christmas of the same year, when the Catalan had been on the list of missing persons for four months. During this consultation, the key to the crime, Cristina explained to her skeptical interlocutor that a man had visited him and died naturally at home. She also told him that, in fear, she had thrown the body into a nearby reservoir. None of this information turned out to be true – with the exception of the death of José María – but they served to accelerate the efforts that investigators from the Judicial Police of the Civil Guard of Orense had been preparing for months.
Above these lines are images of the search that Civil Guard agents carried out, in the company of a forensic anthropologist, to recover the skeletal remains of the victim.
The confession during the consultation, which the doctor did not really believe, led him to pick up the phone and speak to the mayor. of the city. The councilor, equally incredulous, did the same with the agents, who had Cristina on their radar for a long time. And, within hours, the property was searched. The next scenario of this murder case, which will be tried next October 21 at the Provincial Court of Orense, placed the investigators in the garden of Cortegada’s house. A seemingly harmless environment that hid the solution to the crime for which the Galician risks a request of 18 years in prison. There, and under the inmate’s instructions, members of the forensic department led by a forensic anthropologist recovered the skeletal remains of the victim that the woman had attempted to burn in several bonfires spread across the country. To extinguish the flames, the accused used gasoline as an accelerant and used a shovel to dismember the body. His plan was thwarted by a neighbor who caught his attention because she was smoking the facade. So he had to improvise and get rid of what was left of José María by burying it on one side of the house. With the collaboration of Cristina, the agents found the victim’s foot and some of his personal items. Others, like the console, were thrown into nearby bushes. And the cell phone, which had always located the man in the village of Cortegada, was recovered by divers a few days later in the nearby Frieira reservoir.
The truth is that the Judicial Police made it clear that Cristina was hiding something from the first stages of the investigation, because during their interviews with the young woman in the weeks following the report of the disappearance the Galician had incurred striking contradictions. Cristina was surrounded and her confession was the last straw that allowed the body to be recovered and the mechanism of death to be known. Before the investigator in charge of the case, on the second day of the house searches, the young woman admitted that she had drugged and drowned her partner because she no longer had love. She was sent to prison coinciding with Christmas Eve 2021.
Since then, the confessed author of the Cortegada crime has been waiting behind bars, in the Pontevedra de A Lama prison, for a trial in which a popular jury will decide what his life horizon will be. The defense strategy will likely include to the similar mitigating circumstance of psychological alteration mentioned by the prosecutoralthough at this stage an agreement according to which the defendant avoids the plenary session is not excluded. The psychiatric analysis carried out during the investigation of the case showed that Cristina is responsible because “There is no alteration of the information and he fully understands the illegality of the acts with which he is accused”. He only notes, in his defense, that the defendant suffers from a generalized anxiety disorder and an obsessive-compulsive disorder which “moderately” limited his will in relation to the death with which he is accused, “but not the manipulation and the disappearance that followed. ” of the corpse.
With the only accused incarcerated, two years after the crime – in September 2023 – the case added a special epilogue. At the farm where the accused burned her lover several bags appeared with other remains of the victim. Cristina’s ex-partner found them clearing brush and immediately reported it to investigators, who quickly abandoned the activity. Sources in the case told ABC, just before the trial began, that these bags must have been hidden in acacia trees after the search in which José María’s body was found, and They corroborated that there was never any evidence of third party participation in the crime.despite the fact that they were investigated. Once the ghost of the accomplice is removed, all responsibility for the murder falls to Cristina, the disenchanted girlfriend who went from love to hate in a matter of hours.
The author admits it: an elusive personality, with a traumatic past
In the parish where she lived, everyone knew Cristina Rodríguez, but few had started a conversation with her. Huidiza, recently before the crime, worked in a bakery, so she left her house very early, thus avoiding relationships with those around her. Some time ago, the young woman separated from her partner, a man twenty years older than her with whom she had a daughter. The girl and her ex moved to Vigo and she stayed living in the house in Cortegada that the couple had renovated. In the past of the young woman, who has a twin sister, there is also a traumatic episode. A complaint of alleged sexual abuse by their family circle when they were children.
