Cristina Rivas did not deviate even one millimeter from the planned script this Wednesday. The woman accused of murdering her four-year-old daughter Yaiza in May 2021 testified, but only responded to her lawyer’s questions. Serene in the first part of the interrogation, she confessed to having asphyxiated her youngest after having given her lorazepam the night before. Of course, during the approximately three-quarters of an hour that her explanations lasted, she tried to present herself to the jury as a woman who longed to have the family that she did not enjoy as a child, when she witnessed abuse of her mother by her alcoholic father on many occasions. . She claimed to have felt mistreated, humiliated and ignored by the minor’s father, whom she defined as a man who separated her from her as soon as her daughter was born. And it was out of fear of losing the minor that she first decided to commit suicide and at the last moment drag the girl into her decision.
Cristina assured that she did not kill her daughter to harm her father. But when she answered it, not even an hour ago the members of the jury had heard a Court official read aloud the four letters that she had left written by the accused. Some letters in her own handwriting in which she accused Sergio, the minor’s father, of being the only one responsible for the tragic outcome. “If you thought that I was going to die and you were going to get rid of me, to stay with your daughter, you are very wrong,” he told the man in a letter whose content he learned almost at the doors of the trial, because he had refused. to read.
A very harsh letter, full of accusations and reproaches, which, together with Sergio’s testimony in the courtroom on the day of his statement, caused the prosecutor, Félix Martín, to request that another case be opened to investigate the woman for alleged psychological abuse of her ex-partner and father of the girl. Because the purpose of the crime was, in the words of the prosecutor in the final conclusions, “to do her the greatest possible damage not only with her death, but also to emphasize in writing that it was for revenge and her fault.”
The trial in the Barcelona Court, which has been held for the last two weeks, was pending sentencing. Some especially hard sessions that included the heartbreaking story of the victim’s maternal grandmother and her father. Both had no hesitation in pointing out the accused as a “manipulative” who murdered the minor just to cause pain.
The last to testify was Cristina Rivas, who assured that her only intention was to commit suicide “to stop suffering” and that for this reason, after killing her daughter, she ingested 90 pills, which did not achieve the desired effect. “When I wake up, many times I feel like dying. I don’t want to get up when I dream about my daughter. I don’t believe what I did. I have not mourned. Many times I think she is with me, I dream of her in any situation, at home, in the park, she even hugs me and tells me ‘I love you, mommy.’”
The woman has said that she feared that the father would distance the minor from her and her family, especially since he had started a relationship with another woman, and has assured that he made the decision to kill the girl three days before, when he asked Sergio asked if he would let Yaiza see her family if something happened to her: “He told me ‘I am her father and I will do whatever I want.’” However, it did not go unnoticed by either the Prosecutor or the prosecution lawyer, Mireia Gómez, that the accused sought information related to the murder of minors in the weeks prior to the crime of her daughter. Some searches that the woman justified by saying that reading all that information “relaxed me.”
When her lawyer asked her how she felt after the crime, she answered that she felt like she should not be alive, and when asked specifically if she regretted it, she answered: “I regret it, of course I regret it.”
“I apologize for everything I have done,” he added when using the right to the last speaking turn in the trial.
The Prosecutor’s Office and the private prosecution carried out by Yaiza’s paternal family demand a permanent prison sentence that can be reviewed, while the defense tries to exempt the woman from criminal responsibility for having acted with “insurmountable fear” of losing her daughter or a disorder. mental illness that they attribute to the depression that he supposedly suffered and that the psychiatrists denied in their statements on Tuesday.
The woman also followed the case of the presenter and daughter of Rocío Jurado, Rocío Carrasco, and reflected on her to the point of using her expressions, such as “I gave birth to this girl”, in the suicide letters she left, to which the prosecution lawyer has criticized: “Let him compare himself with who he can compare. With José Bretón, with Tomás Gimeno, but let him stop saying Rocío Carrasco, because she, that woman, has not killed anyone.”
Rivas’s mental health was debated in Tuesday’s session with an expert test of about four hours in which three public experts concluded that the woman planned the crime out of resentment and anger towards her ex-partner, being in full mental capacity, while a An expert hired by the defense maintained that Rivas had a personality disorder caused by a childhood in which he witnessed and mediated the abuse that his father inflicted on his mother.
In his final report, prosecutor Félix Martín described the intervention of the private expert as “a spectacle of procedural and psychological frivolity, of confusing terms and trying to mix traits with personality disorders, seeking a mitigating circumstance that is in no way appropriate.” He also received the psychologist from the lawyer Mireia Gómez, for whom
The lawyer for the private prosecution, Mireia Gómez, has also argued against this thesis, for whom the four suicide letters left by the woman “prove that Mrs. Rivas’s mind was wickedly lucid.” As she already advanced in her first intervention at the start of the trial, the lawyer assured that what moved Rivas to commit the crime was the hatred, spite and evil that she felt and that had taken a backseat to her partner in terms of his daughter was born.
For the prosecutor, the woman’s behavior on the same day of the crime shows that she planned the crime and the scene with absolute coldness. He took his daughter for a bike ride and to dinner at McDondald’s, “his favorite restaurant, like death row,” and in the hours following the crime before attempting suicide, he still made 10 phone calls and sent an email to give cancel the receipt for the garage space. Behavior incompatible in the prosecutor’s opinion with an outburst or depression.
“There are also mothers who murder their children, and that does not deny or diminish the very serious problem of sexist violence and vicarious gender violence,” the prosecutor warned the members of the jury. Warning them that with their verdict they should not resolve a legal or political debate.
The lawyer for the private prosecution has warned the jury in a similar sense: “Women can do evil exactly the same as a man, and if we commit an act as atrocious as killing a child, we cannot be allowed to be branded beforehand.” crazy We are not crazy, we can also be bad.” Finally, thinking that a woman can only be bad because of a mental disorder is “a clearly sexist approach.”
Gómez has stressed that Rivas planned the crime perfectly. And he reminded the court that the woman had the opportunity not to move forward when the next day, after giving her lorazepam, the girl was still alive. “But she went ahead and killed her.”
