Asunta Yong-Fang receives an obituary every September 22, as she has been doing for a decade, on the same day of her murder. Some words that everyone thought her adoptive mother, Rosario Porto, sent from prison.
It was never known if this was the case, since Porto died in 2020 in the Brieva prison (Ávila); and Asunta’s adoptive father, the Bilbao journalist Alfonso Basterra, remains in prison and without maintaining any type of relationship or contact if he is not merely strict through his lawyers for his judicial process.
The Netflix series The Asunta Case, based on the real crime of Asunta Basterra, has once again brought to the fore some of the questions that many asked at the time, such as, for example, knowing who was responsible for the annual publication of these obituaries
An issue that was resolved in Espejo Público last Thursday, with Rosario Porto’s lawyer confessing one of the unknowns that has raised the most mystery in the last ten years. The person who commissioned and published the obituaries was not Asunta’s adoptive mother, but himself.
Thus, the well-known Galician criminal lawyer José Luis Gutiérrez Aranguren would have been the one who would have been in charge of this task. “She [Rosario] asked me not to forget to put the obituaries on the anniversaries of her death,” the lawyer reveals in Let’s see.
“I found myself with a person who was isolated, all the people distanced themselves from her, family included, and I saw myself a little in the role of confidant and friend, within certain limits,” the lawyer continued explaining, who also confesses that Porto He made a kind of revelation to her.
“He told me that he wanted to rest with his daughter, I don’t know if it was a premonition of suicide, but the ashes asked me to be in the same place. I limited myself to fulfilling her wish,” confesses the criminal.
In the program, he also stressed that some of the police investigations during the trial were questioned, in addition to having tarnished “the honor” of Rosario Porto, whose innocence he defended until the end.
“I am convinced that she did not kill her,” he said for La Voz de Galicia in an interview in 2023. To this day, he continues to maintain that his client’s case was “a clear case of acquittal,” because “there is not a single only evidence that points in the direction of neither one nor the other.”
As for the series, he praises the actors’ interpretation, but there are scenes with which he “absolutely disagrees.” To be based on real events, to the lawyer “there are a series of issues that, of course, bother me.” Of course, he is sure that if his client had seen the series, she “would be outraged.”
