Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) he has confessed that he burned her body and threw it into the sea, but has always denied killing her.
The court that will judge the case will be chosen the previous Friday, June 2, and the hearing will continue in the City of Justice of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, foreseeably until the 13th, according to the calendar set by the second section of the Audience.
The trial is held four years after the events occurred, before the appeals raised by the defendant’s defense and which were rejected by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands, the last one in March of this year, when it transferred the case to the section second to agree on the date to judge Raúl DC
The Prosecutor’s Office requests a sentence of 20 years and 11 months in prison against the defendant for the six crimes attributed to him: homicide, habitual mistreatment, injuries (in this case two), desecration of a corpse and simulation of crime, in addition to compensation with 300,000 euros to the two children of the deceased, whose family is also accusing the defendant.
Raúl DC, who has been free since last January, after serving four years in pretrial detention (the legal maximum), could be sentenced to a greater sentence, if the request of the Canary Islands Institute for Equality (ICI) that raises the seriousness of what happened from homicide to murder.
The defense of Raúl DC considers that the acts that can be attributed to his client are those of desecration of the corpse, since he alleges that the husband found his wife dead in the bathtub of the house in which they lived, he tried to revive her without success and, due to the affectation of his will by alcohol and cocaine, he suffered a ‘shock’ and a picture of delirium that prompted him to get rid of the young woman’s body.
During the investigation of the case, the defendant acknowledged that he tried to make his wife’s body disappear because he feared that they would blame him for her death (Romina Celeste had denounced him for ill-treatment a long time ago), but he has always denied having killed her.
The accusations, however, maintain that Raúl DC led friends and family to believe that his wife had left home after an argument and even reported her disappearance to the Civil Guard; They also maintain that he considered his wife an inferior being on whom he could unleash her rage and “because she was young, foreign and without resources that she practiced prostitution to support herself financially.”
In addition, during the relationship they had, the defendant assaulted his partner and treated her with contempt, according to the Prosecutor’s Office and the Institute for Equality.
In August 2018, when they were both staying in a hotel, the defendant beat her and, days before her death, between December 27 and 29 of that year, he hit her again and she had to go to the hospital emergency room. of Lanzarote, although she was not attended by the doctor when the defendant appeared there, always according to the version of the accusations.
According to the story presented by the Public Prosecutor, already in the early morning of January 1, 2019, the defendant hit his wife again in different parts of her body and killed her, although the mechanisms that caused her death are unknown, because Only a few tissues were recovered from his body from the sea.
The Institute for Equality argues that the accused killed his wife by surprise, limiting his defense and increasing his suffering and pain, which leads him to raise the charges to murder.
To get rid of his body, the defendant burned it in the barbecue at his house, then dismembered it and spent two days hiding it in garbage bags that he dumped into the sea in Costa Teguise twice: first, one part in the Los Ancones, and then another in Los Hervideros, for which he rented a vehicle on January 3.
Likewise, according to the accusations, the defendant got rid of the barbecue and instruments used to dismember the corpse and other objects that could incriminate him.
Romina Celeste’s husband was arrested on January 13, 2019 and, after his release, he changed his residence this winter to Madrid, where he has been obliged to appear before a court weekly since he was released from Tahíche prison, in Lanzarote. EFE