CIUDAD VICTORIA, Tamaulipas — The ongoing case of a Spanish woman who was murdered while visiting a local beach in this border state took a drastic turn when authorities arrested the victim’s husband as the prime suspect.
Tamaulipas authorities arrested Jose Gonzalez Fernandez this week, the husband of Spanish national Pilar Garrido Santamans based on an ongoing investigation that identified him as the prime suspect in the strangulation murder of his wife, state authorities revealed to Breitbart Texas.
In early July, Gonzalez reported that his wife, Garrido Santamans, was kidnapped by a group of cartel gunmen who tried to rob them and take their vehicle, Breitbart Texas reported. The victim’s body was found weeks later near the area where Gonzalez claimed they were attacked.
In public address, Tamaulipas Attorney General Irving Barrios Mujica said there is enough evidence to consider Gonzalez Fernandez as the responsible party.
“We took penal action against him in front of a judge who ruled that the elements provided were sufficient to issue an arrest warrant,” Barrios Mujica said.
The attorney general said he spoke with Rosa Maria Santamans Martin, the victim’s mother in Spain and explained the turn of events in the case. The attorney general also revealed that the suspect had been an instructor for the Tamaulipas Public Security Secretariat. He refused to go into details about the case or the evidence but revealed that key factors were the contradictions provided by the suspect.
Another element was the way the victim was killed; Mexican drug cartels and their henchmen do not commonly strangulate victims. One of the most important issues that initially raised suspicion with authorities was the length of time it took for Gonzalez to report his wife missing.
Initially, Gonzalez claimed that he, his wife and their young son had gone to a beach in La Pesca on July 1. The following day, a group of gunmen in a vehicle stopped them and took the victim. The suspect did not report the disappearance until the following day because he and his son were tired. Since a ransom demand was never made, authorities filed the case as a missing person’s investigation and in the tenth search operation discovered the victim’s body. An autopsy revealed that she had been strangled.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by “Francisco Morales” from Tamaulipas.
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