John Nelson Poulos, accused of murdering the Colombian DJ Valentina Trespalacios and throwing her body in a garbage dump in Bogotá, would have taken the young woman after learning that she was allegedly having a relationship with another man.
The jealousy of Poulos, married with three children in Texas, would have preceded the brutal attack reported last Sunday in an apartment in the Colombian capital.
That day and after spending the entire weekend with the DJ, Poulos, 35, strangled the 23-year-old after forcing her to have sex with him in an apartment he rented in the Colombian capital.
Security camera images from the place captured the suspect when he leaves with the suitcase in which he would have placed the victim’s body to throw it in a garbage container in the Versalles neighborhood, in the town of Fontibón.
According to the evidence handled by the Colombian Attorney General’s Office, the man would have squared his plan in advance to the point that he told the person who rented him the car he used during the hours prior to the murder that he had returned to Colombia to unmask his girlfriend. .
“I have a girlfriend here, but I know she is cheating on me and I am going to find out,” the American would have said to the person who filled out the documents for renting the vehicle, according to the local media outlet Semana.
In a court hearing last week, prosecutor Daniel Gómez Acuña spoke about the unhealthy jealousy that Poulos allegedly felt in the midst of his relationship with the DJ. Allegedly, the defendant saw the young woman as his “personal object”.
A friend of Valentiva told the prosecutors in the case that Poulos was upset because the young woman had supposedly gone to Aruba with another man.
“John was going to make a consignment of $1,000 dollars, but Valentina had gone to Aruba with Santiago Luna. She didn’t know how to make John not realize he was there. Then, Valentina told her that he had a ring somewhere else, and that was when she told him that he needed the money ($1,000) and to send it to me. That’s when John, through the MoneyGram exchange house, sent it to me,” the witness explained.
Allegedly, after that the foreigner found out that Valentina was on the Caribbean island with a person, since she hired a private investigator to spy on the Colombian. After the information provided by the investigator, Poulos decided to commit the crime, according to the Prosecutor’s Office.
Part of the plan, according to authorities, was to escape to Istanbul, Turkey.
For these purposes, the man flew to Panama, where he was arrested on Tuesday of last week.
Intelligence officials in Panama reportedly alerted the immigration authorities that the man was at the Tocumen International Airport, where he was trying to board the flight to southeast Europe. With the help of Interpol, he was caught in time and the next day he was extradited to Colombia.
The American faces charges of aggravated femicide in competition with concealment, alteration and destruction of evidence, accusations for which he pleaded not guilty.
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