The murder of Yulisa in A Pobra: tortured 36 times over a 45-euro debt
In June 2017, Yulisa Altagracia was found dead on a smallholding in A Pobra do Caramiñal. The Civil Guard identified and arrested her killers in just eight hours.
An eight-hour investigation to close a 45-euro murder
On the night of 7 June 2017, the owner of a small smallholding in A Pobra do Caramiñal, a municipality in A Coruña province, contacted the authorities after finding a body among the bushes on his land. It was around ten at night. According to one of the agents from the Judicial Police of the Civil Guard in A Coruña who attended the scene, the following eight hours unfolded "at a vertiginous pace".
On the ground lay the body of a woman of Latin appearance, lying on her side, without documents, without a mobile phone, and with no missing person report that matched her description across the entire district. The subsequent autopsy would determine that she had received 36 blows to the head—inflicted with a screwdriver—and that she had died from blood loss following prolonged agony. The motive for the crime: a debt of 45 euros.
No name and no clues, two immediate lines of investigation
From their initial visual analysis, officers established that the death had been violent and that the body had been transported to the smallholding: there were no drag marks and barely any traces of blood in the surroundings. This pointed to more than one perpetrator.
With nightfall, the investigation proceeded along two lines. The first led them to consider a worker from one of the canning factories in the area, which provided employment for much of the local population. However, because it was late and a public holiday, all the facilities were closed and this hypothesis was set aside for the moment. The second line led them to the strip clubs in the district. The victim's youth and the fact that she had breast implants tipped the scales towards this direction with scarcely room for deliberation.
The identification: the first turning point
Shortly after midnight, officers arrived at the Nanys nightclub in Ribeira. A worker at the establishment told them that a colleague had not shown up for her shift that day and showed them a photograph. It was two in the morning. The image matched the body from the smallholding. The victim had a name: Yulisa Altagracia, 39 years old, Dominican national, who had left her country in search of a better life in Galicia.
"The identification of the victim was very quick, and that is very important in a case like this," the agent explained to ABC.
A hamburger and a key witness
The next step took investigators to a hamburger restaurant in Ribeira that was about to close. There, a friend of Yulisa provided decisive information: that same morning, in the Maruxía bar, he had seen a woman enter the premises, approach Yulisa, and remove her from there roughly. Yulisa returned to the bar a few seconds later and asked her friend to photograph the registration plate of the vehicle in which she was leaving, "just in case something happened to her".
Yulisa's premonition did not save her life. But the registration plate she asked to be captured did pave the way towards her killers.
The drug-dealing couple, old acquaintances
At four in the morning, with that registration plate and the witness's account on the table, Civil Guard officers already had a clear profile of the suspects. It was a couple of drug traffickers from A Pobra do Caramiñal known to the command: Ventura Lustres, nicknamed "O Farelo", aged 32, and Melisa Abelleira, aged 29.
The investigators presented themselves at their home before dawn. At 6:15 on 8 June, both were arrested.
No collaboration or remorse
During interrogation, neither Lustres nor Abelleira showed any willingness to cooperate. Their statements contradicted each other, and both denied having seen Yulisa that day, despite investigators already having the witness testimony that contradicted that account. The case was closed with an additional piece of evidence: when a cousin of Yulisa came to the barracks to learn of her relative's fate, she passed the detained couple in the corridor and recognised them immediately as the victim's drug suppliers.
According to the investigation account, the debt that triggered the crime was 45 euros. For that amount, Yulisa was tortured with a screwdriver driven into her head 36 times until she died from blood loss.
The command that also solved the murders of Asunta and Diana Quer
The same unit of the Judicial Police in A Coruña that solved the case of Yulisa Altagracia in eight hours is the one that, according to ABC, also investigated other high-profile murders in Galicia, including those of Asunta Basterra, Diana Quer, and Elisa Abruñedo.
"What I remember most from that night is how quickly things were moving. Every new step we thought of taking moved us forward," emphasised the agent who participated in the investigation, recalling those hours nine years after the crime.
Source: ABC