The Court of Beja today sentenced a 54-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman to 22 years in prison for the murder of an elderly German couple in a village in the municipality.
When reading the judgment, the president of the panel of judges who tried the case said that the court “has no doubt that it was the two of them who killed these people” and ruled that the two crimes of murder and one of theft of which they were accused were proven.
The court found that the defendants were taken in by the German couple because they had nowhere else to go and that, a few days later, they beat the 71-year-old woman and the 78-year-old man with an iron bar, left them in their house and returned later to take the victims’ car and bank cards.
“This behavior is of considerable gravity. They showed coldness, absence of remorse and contempt for these people who helped them and this was the way they repaid the good they did them,” said the president of the collective, underlining the “absence of any act of regret or repentance” on the part of the defendants.
According to the judge, the murderers, both currently in pre-trial detention, were sentenced to 22 years in prison for two counts of simple homicide and one count of aggravated theft.
In its decision, the court changed the legal classification of the two counts of murder of which both were accused, from qualified, as stated in the prosecution’s indictment, to simple.
What was at stake, the magistrate explained, was the fact that the two elderly people were independent and that it wasn’t a frivolous crime, in other words, “there was a conflict” over the money the murderers wanted to receive for their farm work.
Regarding the crime of theft, the president of the collective recalled that the two murderers “went so far as to sell the car” of the victims and “used the [bank] cards without worrying” because “they knew they were no longer here to oppose” their behavior.
In addition to the 22-year prison sentence, the two defendants were also ordered to pay compensation of 30,000 euros to a daughter of the German couple for non-pecuniary damage.
As they left the court, the lawyers of the two defendants limited themselves to admitting that they intended to appeal the decision.
Nuno Pássaro, the lawyer of a daughter of the German couple, said that with this decision, his constituent “feels that justice has been done”.
“She’s not doing very well psychologically, but this brings some comfort and that’s the most important thing, to feel that justice has been done in a crime as macabre as this,” he added.
During the trial, the defendant refused to speak in court, while the defendant denied the crimes, but did not rule out the possibility that the man had committed them.
The murders allegedly took place on April 16, 2023 on the German couple’s farm in Baleizão, Beja, but the bodies were only found by the authorities almost a month later, on May 11, following an alert from a son who lives in Germany.
