The crime of the Galician girl Asunta Basterra Porto shocked Spanish society in 2013. The 12-year-old girl was murdered and found on the margins of a forest road a few kilometers from a country house that had her family.
Her mother, Rosario Porto, reported the girl’s disappearance to the Police and, just an hour later, the authorities found the little girl’s lifeless body. After taking statements from the parents of the deceased, the investigators realized that Basterra and Porto’s speech presented different inconsistencies and ordered her immediate arrest.
It should be noted that Porto was arrested one day before Basterra. When they met in adjoining cells, those then suspected of the girl’s murder had a conversation that has come to light in its entirety.
”Your feverish imagination is going to cause us a lot of problems,” the woman is heard saying in the recording before her ex-partner asked her for silence. ”And just because I had all the insects in my house… with a cushion doesn’t mean I’m suffocating people with cushions (…) Look at what you’ve created,” Porto continues on the track, blaming Basterra.
”Of course not my life. But since they have nothing else, they say “the parents are suspicious,” the journalist can be heard saying, trying to reassure the Galician lawyer. At that moment, you can hear how Porto alludes to some messages that the man had sent her: ”Yes, but I was so stupid that all the things that you sent me to… I wanted you to come to your senses, to make you see the damage you did to me.”
In the rest of the conversation you can see how Asunta’s mother insists on the idea that killing spiders with a cushion has nothing to do with doing something more serious and how Basterra tries to reassure the woman: ”Let’s let them act and let them work. However, at the end, Porto changes his tone and apologizes to her ex for the damage she has done to him, as well as showing his concern for “the other thing.”
The Netflix premiere of The Asunta Case has rescued the crime from media oblivion and has made millions of people around the world comment on the murder of the 12-year-old girl. The series has been a global phenomenon and Candela Peña and Tristán Ulloa (those who play Porto and Basterra) have received hundreds of positive reviews.
Although nothing can be said about its commercial success, many have criticized the lack of morality when it comes to bringing to the small screen a real case in which an underage girl died.
