Blood stains and hidden knife condemn Nerea Fernández to 22 years for murdering her boyfriend in Zafra
The forensic analysis by the Guardia Civil dismantled Nerea Fernández's version of self-defence, and she was convicted of murdering Iván Melo with stab wounds in Zafra in 2024.
The trail of blood that unravelled Nerea Fernández's version
Three Guardia Civil forensic specialists arrived early in the morning on a narrow street of low white houses in Zafra, a town of 17,000 inhabitants in the province of Badajoz. On the pavement lay Iván Melo, 42 years old, dead from stab wounds. According to Ideal, the analysis of blood stains carried out by those forensic scientists would prove decisive in the popular jury condemning his girlfriend, Nerea Fernández, to 22 years in prison for murder.
The events occurred on 9 July 2024. When investigators arrived at the scene, the victim's girlfriend was the only person who had been in the house with him. Her version: in the early hours of the morning, an unknown person had rung at the door; Iván had gone out to open it, returned to the hallway seriously wounded and collapsed on the street when both of them went out to seek help. The trial took place in January and the jury rejected that account.
What the stains in the bedroom revealed
When registering the house, the forensic specialists immediately found a trail of blood droplets leading from the main bedroom to the street door, where a blood mark indicated the point at which Iván had leaned before going outside. But the most relevant findings were on top of the bed headboard: three spatters—two to the right and one to the left—which the specialists identified as projections from an object stained with blood, that is, from the knife being withdrawn from the body after the assault.
The forensic report described those marks with precision: "They form an arc of projection (…) they present the dimensions of a low-velocity spatter (of 2.8 to 3 mm); they form, at least, two units of action; their angle of impact on the surface is 19° (indication 34) and 16° (indication 35), and they show the morphological characteristics of a pattern of blood thrown or cast from an object stained with blood."
At trial, the forensic scientist who signed the scene examination interpreted those traces as the beginning of the assault: Nerea had positioned herself astride over Iván, who was lying in bed—with drug consumption as an additional factor—made two cuts to his forehead and stabbed him in the chest. The victim managed to flee towards the hallway, where he received a fourth wound to his left arm before collapsing dead on the pavement.
The fatal wound that did not bleed and the mop that gleamed in the darkness
The forensic pathologists confirmed that the stab wound in the centre of the chest was the cause of death: the weapon reached the aorta, the blood accumulated around the heart and prevented it from functioning. The external wound did not bleed because the knife pierced the breastbone, whose spongy core acted as a plug. The other three wounds—the two to the forehead and the one to the triceps—did bleed profusely and were the ones that told the story.
The specialists also noted that the initial absence of stains on the bedroom floor was anomalous. To verify this, they walked through the house in darkness using Bluestar, the reagent that reveals blood residues invisible to the naked eye. The bedroom floor gleamed with blue light in several areas. The mop too. The conclusion was that someone had cleaned the room after the crime.
Another indication pointed in the same direction: in the hallway there appeared skeletal droplets, that is, blood stains with a hollow in the centre. That pattern forms when the droplets are drying and someone treads on them, dragging part of the projection.
The bags handed to the neighbour
The hypothesis of scene manipulation was reinforced by the testimony of a neighbour. Shortly after seeing Iván dead on the pavement, Nerea Fernández handed her three plastic bags asking her to keep them. When the Guardia Civil searched them, they found clothes belonging to the defendant, shoes, dog toys, her identity card and a knife with a 7.5-centimetre blade with blood residues.
Faced with that evidence, Fernández confessed. However, she claimed she had acted in self-defence: according to her version, Iván tried to kill her following an argument related to drug consumption. She also pointed out that she was a victim of domestic violence. Iván Melo had indeed been convicted of assaulting her months earlier and a restraining order existed, although the couple had resumed their relationship.
The victim's family version and the verdict
The deceased's family presented an opposite reading. They maintained that Fernández was jealous because Iván wanted to resume the relationship with his ex-partner, and that the attack was premeditated. The popular jury, which heard both the declaration of the forensic scientists and other testimony—including that of the forensic pathologists, which proved less damaging to the defendant—fully accepted the blood spatter analysis carried out by the Guardia Civil specialists.
Nerea Fernández, aged 35, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 22 years in prison. The jury's verdict ruled out both the presence of an unknown third party and the thesis of self-defence.
Source: Ideal