A cruel couple told police their daughter had disappeared from their family home – but it became clear they’d drugged and suffocated her, leaving her for dead on a country road
To the outside world, they looked like the perfect family – Rosario Porto and her husband Alfonso Basterra were in their mid-30s when they adopted a baby girl.
According to The Guardian, Punto, a lawyer from Santiago de Compostela, northern Spain, and Basterra, a journalist from the Basque Country, had had no trouble persuading local Spanish authorities that they would make good parents.
The wealthy Spanish couple adopted Asunta Fong Yang as a baby, but when she was just 12 years old, she was found dead beside a country road.
It follows news that a mum killed toddlers by placing them in oven and turning it on in ‘real-life horror movie’
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Porto even appeared on local television to share her wisdom and experience about adopting.
At first, things were great – Asunta was so bright she skipped an academic year, and the family’s privilege meant she could enjoy private classes in English, French, Chinese, ballet, violin, and piano.
“She once told us what her Saturdays were like,” Asunta’s ballet teacher, an English woman named Gail Brevitt, recalled. “She got up at 7 am, did Chinese from 8 until 10, came to ballet from 10.15 to 12.30, then did French until lunchtime. And then there was violin and piano.”
To the outside world, everything looked like a dream. Carmen González, the family’s cleaner and nanny, said: “To me they seemed an idyllic family.”
But behind closed doors, things were far from perfect. In 2009, Porto spent two nights in a private psychiatric hospital, saying she felt suicidal, apathetic, and guilty. Then, in 2013, she and Basterra divorced after Porto lost both her parents in the preceding 18 months and admitted to having an affair.
Despite their struggles, no one suspected they were capable of murdering the child they had adopted. But on September 22, 2013, Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra reported Asunta missing.
The police record noted that Asunta had been left at her mother’s apartment doing her homework at 7 pm while Porto went to the family’s country house 20 minutes away.
Even though there was no physical evidence, such as fingerprints or fibres, linking Porto to the girl’s corpse, the police had CCTV evidence from a camera at a petrol station near her apartment.
The footage showed Porto driving the family’s car towards their country house with a long-haired girl sitting beside her. The timecode revealed the footage had been taken at a time when, according to Porto’s versions of events, Asunta was meant to be at home.
When shown the video, Porto admitted the passenger was her daughter, but claimed Asunta felt ill and was later taken home. But police noted that when they had taken her to the country house hours after the body was found, the mum rushed towards a room that contained a wastepaper basket with bits of orange baler twine inside.
The twine was similar to some found next to the body, which, investigators concluded, must have been used to tie Asunta’s limbs together. However, forensic scientists were unable to prove bits found on the corpse came from the house.
In addition to the CCTV footage, forensic results suggested Asunta had been drugged and then smothered. Tests of Asunta’s blood and urine revealed toxic levels of lorazepam – the main active ingredient in the Orfidal pills that Porto had been prescribed to help with her anxiety attacks.
Meanwhile, teachers at two music academies recalled that in the months before her death, Asunta had been unable to read her sheet music or walk straight. “I took some white powders,” she told Isabel Bello, who ran one of the academies. “I don’t know what they are giving me. No one tells me the truth,” she complained to a violin teacher.
Forensic scientists tested a strand of Asunta’s hair and discovered the presence of lorazepam along the first three centimetres and concluded she had also been ingesting smaller doses of the drug for three months.
Investigators believed Porto murdered Asunta, but she wouldn’t have been able to lift the body alone, as she was slight and only 4ft 8in tall.
In October 2015, the prosecution laid out its case before a jury, claiming the couple devised a plan to kill their own daughter – though they eventually downgraded the charges against Basterra, saying he was an accomplice to his ex-wife’s murder plot.
Asunta, the jury was told, had somehow been made to swallow at least 27 ground-up pills – nine times as powerful as a strong adult dose – on the day she died.
The judge handed Basterra and Porto 18-year sentences, as the crime was committed before a new law introduced life sentences for child murderers. Both have appealed to have their convictions overturned.
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