In a first version of the events, Rosario Porto had declared that she left Asunta at around 7:00pm at her home in Santiago de Compostela, and that when she returned a couple of hours later, the girl was no longer there. The security cameras show that Rosario had gone to the garage much earlier than she stated, an error she attributed to nervousness. The manner and location in which the body was abandoned led investigators to suspect the victim's family. At the start of the investigation, when the agents tried to reconstruct her route, Rosario commented that, before heading to Teo to pick up some swimsuits, she had stopped in a double row in front of her apartment door to pick up a bag. Upon finding the image from the gas station camera and discovering that in the mother's car, at 6:21:24 pm, in the passenger seat there was a short person wearing white clothes, undoubtedly Asunta, the police deduced that Rosario had lied. On Tuesday, 24 September, after the
cremation of her daughter's body, Rosario was arrested and charged due to the inconsistencies and contradictions in her statements. The following day, Alfonso Basterra was also arrested and charged. After learning the results of the toxicology report, investigators suspected him because he had bought large quantities of lorazepam for his ex-wife. For three days, the parents were held in two nearby cells in the
Civil Guard's cells, where all their conversations were recorded without their consent by order of the examining judge. Later, the Provincial Court of A Coruña annulled the validity of these recordings and prohibited their use in the trial. The mother modified her testimony when she learned of the existence of images from security cameras in which she was seen in the car with the minor on her way to Teo. According to the new version, when Porto went upstairs to get a bag, the girl told her she was bored and wanted to go with her, so they went together to the country house. After the mother deactivated the villa's alarm, Asunta changed her mind and said she wanted to return to Santiago to continue with her homework. Porto took her back around 6:50 p.m., leaving Asunta near her father's house without being able to specify the exact location, and returned to her house in Montouto. The return trip from Teo took much longer than the trip there. Porto stated that this was due to traffic, a stop at a gas station (though she didn't fill up, and no security cameras captured her there), and because she headed back to
Decathlon but didn't go in because she realized it was getting late. The prosecution considered this explanation implausible and an attempt to justify the long return trip. An analysis of Asunta's hair revealed that she had consumed high doses of
lorazepam three months before her death, which is associated with the testimonies of dizziness and drowsiness provided by the teachers at the music academy. The charge was changed from
manslaughter to
murder, due to the
aggravating factors of
malice aforethought and kinship. A cousin of Rosario Porto's father told reporters that there was an economic motive in the crime because the daughter was the universal heir of the grandparents and pointed out that Rosario could have killed her parents. The Civil Guard ruled out an economic motive: Rosario was the only heir and her parents had not made any donation to their granddaughter during her lifetime. A year before Asunta's death, the grandmother had died in bed at the age of 77 and the father, seven months later, at 88, also in bed, both from natural causes. The death certificates were signed without any problems and there had been no suspicions about these two deaths. The Civil Guard was unable to investigate further because of the cremation of the bodies. The examining magistrate denied that any enquiries were being carried out into these two deaths. In early October, the Civil Guard's central crime laboratory identified the genetic profile of a man, a young Colombian resident in
Madrid, when testing two samples of fabric cut from Asunta's T-shirt. The young man had been accused of raping a minor at a party at his home, but was later acquitted. That is why a condom with samples of his
semen was found in the same laboratory and the same cold room where Asunta's T-shirt was analysed. The young man had a solid alibi, as he had dinner that night in Madrid, with his girlfriend, his sister and a friend of his sister, they had posted photos of the dinner on
Facebook that night and the receipt for the dinner that night also coincided with what was seen in the photos. Even so, the defences of Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra would try to direct suspicion towards this third man, who the press dubbed "the semen man". On 30 October,
El Mundo published as an exclusive report an alleged leak of the recordings of Asunta's parents in jail. This information was subsequently repeated by almost all the major media outlets in the country. The programme
Espejo Público (Public Mirror) on Spanish TV channel
Antena 3 leaked the first recordings of Asunta's parents in
pre-trial detention. Actors reproduced the words of the detainees. Rosario: "You and your little games... Have you had time to get rid of that?" Alfonso: "Shut up, maybe they're listening to us". These phrases do not appear in the official police transcript nor are they heard in any other part of the conversations that were not transcribed, yet they were accepted and repeated for years, before and after the trial, by almost all the Spanish media, including public television."Probably the most serious episode in the whole matter of the conversations in the prison cells is how one television station quite literally invented some sentences; if they had been used in the trial they would have been exceedingly incriminating, although if the conversations had been used in trial it would immediately have become obvious that this part was an invention. The programme in question was broadcast in October 2013; they used actors to recreate the conversations and quite simply added the following dialogue on, wich [(sic)] does not appear in either the official transcription or in any other part of the conversations that they did not transcribe. Rosario and Alfonso supposedly said: R: You and your little games. Did you have time to get rid of that? A: Shut up, they might be listening to us. The first and last of these three sentences are purely fictitious, while the second one is an adaptation of what Rosario did say: "You didn´t have time to do that, did you?" The problem is that these sentences were then taken as an accepted truth and repeated
ad infinitum in the newspapers and magazines and on the
televisión (even on the
National News on
TVE-1, on 30October 2013).These fabricated conversations were not used in the trial because all the recordings were declared inadmissible for violating the fundamental right to privacy of communications. According to the Provincial Court's decision, "they may not be used in any way in the proceedings." Interestingly, another part of the genuine recordings did indicate that Rosario and Alfonso had not met that afternoon to put the girl in the car. At the end of December, Alfonso Basterra's
laptop and
mobile phone appeared in his home in Santiago. Alfonso's lawyer wrote to the court that Basterra was going to stop renting and that in that flat "the computer of the accused and his telephone have always been there". The two objects that the police had been looking for appeared immediately, although the small apartment had already been thoroughly searched by the agents three months earlier, even though they were not looking for a computer but for evidence of the crime such as
sedatives or
medications. Alfonso Basterra's brother and sister testified at the trial that the computer had been there the whole time and that they were surprised it hadn't been taken away. In June 2014, it was leaked that Alfonso Basterra had visited many
pornographic websites including a high proportion of "pornographic videos and images showing women with
Asian features," which sparked numerous rumours about his sexual tendencies. It was never made public how many of the videos or images depicted Asian women, but the officers' report on the contents of the laptop concluded that the defendant visited all kinds of erotic and sexual websites, not only concerning Asian women. At the trial, the technicians were unable to prove that the hard drive had been replaced. The defendant's
Facebook page was also commented on in various media. Among the 264 people added to his page, there were friends related to his work,
spas and
tourism, personal friends and workers in the Galician press or television, but also four foreign Asian girls. These girls shared photos of themselves in erotic poses on Facebook, but none of these photos appeared on the defendant's Facebook page. Also in June, a specialized unit of the
Civil Guard, the Crimes Against Persons Unit recovered deleted photographs from Asunta's mobile phone (formerly owned by her mother). These photographs were considered compromising. They included images of the girl sleeping, with her eyes closed, wrapped in a duvet. Particularly compromising were photographs taken after the girl's ballet end-of-year party. Nine-year-old Asunta appeared dressed as a cabaret dancer, wearing a corset and fishnet stockings. This was the costume chosen by the teacher for all the students. Several photographs were taken, and in two of them, Asunta is lying in an armchair with her legs spread over an armrest, looking tired. Numerous articles and programmes in the Spanish media confused the appearance of the photographs of the girl on the mother's old mobile phone with the pornography and images of Asian women found on the father's computer. Sometimes it was stated that the photographs were on the father's computer, other times the two reports were simply published together without clearly distinguishing that they were two different facts. The trial, which was to begin on 13June, was postponed until the end of September. On 29September, the first day of the trial, the four remaining candidates required for jury formation were chosen after more than four hours. Three candidates were rejected by the defence lawyers and one by the
prosecution. Following the jury's verdict and the condemnatory
sentence, Rosario Porto's lawyer, José Luis Gutiérrez Aranguren, expressed his opinion that the jury was contaminated by the media and that he would state this in the appeals that he was going to present before the High Court of Justice of Galicia and the Spanish Supreme Court:"In the case at hand, the impact of the mass media in the formation of a preference for the accusatory thesis in public opinion is ostensible. For example, on
20November 2013, journalist José Manuel Pan published the following headline on the website of the
newspaper La Voz de Galicia: "
Rosario Porto killed Asunta in Teo and she alone disposed of the body". "During the two years between their arrest and trial, countless headlines condemning the parents appeared in the most widely viewed and read media outlets in Spain and the province where they were to be tried: "Asunta's parents conspired to kill the girl through 'perverse reasoning'" (
El Mundo ), "The summary reveals that Asunta's murder was a 'prearranged plan' by the parents" (El Mundo), "You and your little games (...) Did you have time to get rid of that?" (El Mundo), “Rosario Porto to Alfonso Basterra: 'You and your little games (...) Did you have time to get rid of that?'” (
La Voz de Galicia), “Alfonso Basterra had intimate photos of Asunta and pornographic material of Asian women” (La Voz de Galicia), “Did they kill Asunta because she bothered them?” (El Mundo, the day before jury selection), “Asunta’s father was with the girl when she was poisoned and in two other incidents” (
El País), “Asunta case: the cruelty of some targeted parents” (
ABC), “Asunta’s parents, conspiring to kill their daughter” (ABC), “Asunta case: the father drugged her, the mother suffocated her, and there are no third parties involved” (ABC), “Why was Asunta Basterra killed? The crime at the hands of her parents, Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra" (
Telecinco), "The Court sees numerous indications that Basterra participated in the murder of Asunta" (La Opinión A Coruña), "Rosario Porto seems willing to blame the crime on her ex-husband to save herself" (La Opinión A Coruña). ==Verdict==