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Susana Zamora
Thursday, 8 August 2024, 18:28
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The provincial court of León has sentenced a man who swindled an 81-year-old woman with a mental disorder out of nearly 300,000 euros to seven years in prison. The man managed to deceive his neighbour for years, leaving her without all her savings, after tricking her into believing that the money was deposited in the "Bank of Heaven" in order to build a home for her deceased relatives.
According to the evidence, the victim suffered from "an alteration in the content of her thoughts, in the form of mystical-religious and megalomaniacal delusions that totally altered her capacity for judgement and decision-making, as it placed her outside reality. This situation and delirious idea became more and more present, altering her cognitive and volitional capacities completely".
The judges in the case said it had been proven that the accused, aware of the woman's mental state (of her exaggerated religious ideas that even made her consider herself a "saint"), schemed the possibility of getting hold of all the savings she had deposited in different banks. To this end, he made the old woman believe, with telephone calls from a private number, that "Our Lord Jesus Christ" or the "Virgin Mary" was calling to ask her to withdraw different amounts of money from her accounts and give them to him to deposit them in the "Bank of Heaven" or to take them to the shop that the accused ran.
Once there, the magistrates said, "In a massage room in the premises, he told her to put the money in a drawer from where it went to the 'Bank of Heaven', leading her to believe that there she would earn more and could build a house in heaven, together with her mother and husband - both now deceased". Likewise, the court underlines, he convinced her that he also deposited money in the aforementioned "heavenly bank".
The court was told that to give greater credibility to the "apparitions", the accused staged conversations in his shop or on the phone, changing or altering his voice and making the old woman believe that she was talking to her deceased mother, God or the Virgin Mary, pressuring her by saying that they would kill her children or make the money deposited in heaven disappear if she told anyone that she was giving him her money.
With this ruse, the accused kept the woman deceived for six years, during which time he acquired almost 287,000 euros of the old woman's money. The victim lost all her savings and was left with only the monthly payments of her small pension, which the accused was unable to get hold of as he was discovered and denounced by the victim's children.
It was during one of the visits made by the elderly woman to the defendant's shop, when she and he were alone, that the victim recorded the conversation between the two of them. In their conversation, the now condemned man kept pretending to be a celestial being, changing or using different voices, telling her that he could not serve those who had no money or those who were telling things and added: "(...) If you say one word I will kill your children". He also said: "(...) You are lying, don't you see that I am God".
Not only has the elderly woman lost all her savings, but she ended up in debt to the bank from which she took out a personal loan (finally cancelled by her son's repayment action). "Now she is facing her future not with what she had, but with what she has left after the predatory action of the accused who, no doubt, knew that with his successive demands he would end up depleting all the assets of the old lady. Remember in her statement at the trial, she said she had even asked him to buy bread as she no longer had any money, and he replied that he could not give her anything as he had had unforeseen expenses due to an alleged illness of his mother," the magistrates said during the summing up of the case.
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