The wife of John Nelson Poulos, the American accused of strangling Colombian DJ Valentina Trespalacios and then throwing her body into a garbage can, said she was unaware of the “double life” led by the man she had asked for a divorce. for “abusive”.
In a statement to CBS on Tuesday, Ashley Poulos said she was deeply saddened by the murder of the 23-year-old girl, whose remains were found on Sunday, January 22, in a garbage container in the Versalles neighborhood, in the town of Fontibón. , in Bogota.
Poulos, 35, had three children with the woman. The eldest suffered from cancer when he was 4 years old, but he overcame it.
The couple married in 2009 and lived in Franklin, Wisconsin.
According to the woman’s version, the marriage deteriorated after the child’s illness and became abusive, so she decided to ask for a divorce in 2021.
He recounted that Poulos transferred all the family funds to a trust outside the country, leaving them with nothing.
Ashley indicated that her ex-partner left the US to travel to various countries in Europe until she decided to settle in Texas.
“John abandoned his children and has not seen them in person since he left Wisconsin in January 2021. His actions triggered a terrible divorce proceeding that has not yet been finalized,” revealed Ashley Poulos.
Poulos had allegedly promised Trespalacios that he would move to Colombia and marry her. Apparently, Trespalacios was unaware of Poulos’s wife and children.
However, after learning that the Colombian had another relationship with the influencer and cryptocurrency investor Santiago Luna, Poulos would have planned to kill her.
For these purposes and according to the prosecutors in the case in Colombia, the foreigner rented a car and an apartment in the north of Bogotá. Inside the building he would have murdered Trespalacios after forcing her to have sex. Subsequently, he put her body in a suitcase that he took out in a shopping cart from the unit and placed it in the trunk of a rental car to dispose of. The suspect also disposed of the victim’s cell phone.
Trespalacios and Poulos met on a dating app and were in a long-distance relationship for about a year. During that period, they were seen in people about four times in Mexico and Colombia.
Poulos was arrested last week at the Tocumen airport, in the capital of Panama, when he was preparing to board a flight to Istanbul, Turkey.
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