Mariana Fonseca appears to have ‘played system’ to leave country before being ordered to jail
Young former Lagos Hospital nurse, Mariana Fonseca – condemned to 23 years in jail for her part in the callous murder and butchering of a young IT technician five years ago – has gone ‘on the run’ after ‘playing the system’ before her freedom was forcibly removed.
This is the conclusion of tabloid Correio da Manhã which has been trying to find Fonseca since news last month that her ‘last appeal’ – this time to the Constitutional Court – had failed.
Technically, the young woman should have been taken into custody straight afterwards, but the process in Portugal doesn’t work this way – and it transpires that the court did not inform the ‘first court’ that heard the case (and bizarrely found Fonseca not guilty) – and therefore this court could not emit the necessary arrest warrant.
CM believes that Fonseca went on the run long before news of the failed appeal. “The appeal to the Constitutional Court was just a way of gaining time to allow her to make her getaway. She is now with a male companion, also young”, says the paper, stressing she “could have left Europe” (meaning be ‘quite some way ahead’ of any authorities now girded to find her…)
Ms Fonseca’s story is already worthy of a film: she even managed to sue her previous employers (after the murder) for wrongful dismissal because they did not want her back. According to reports, she ‘won’ €30,000 compensation.
The murder of Diogo Gonçalves shocked the Algarve for the sheer callousness of it: his attackers wanted to go away together, and thought that a recent inheritance of €70,000 that Gonçalves had come into would be their lucky passport.
Once Gonçalves was throttled to death, and his fingers severed, he was dismembered, his body parts scattered in well-known beauty spots. The discovery of his head will have ruined the outing of a tourist couple, but it kick-started the police investigation which very quickly found the culprits. Fonseca always claimed she had nothing to do with any of it and that it was all down to her female lover at the time, Maria Malveiro, who took the full fall in the first trial, and ended up committing suicide shortly after.
Fonseca was ‘luckier’ in that she was freed after the first trial, and although a subsequent appeal by public prosecutors saw her condemned to 25 years, she has remained free as she ‘appealed it’ (seeing two years lopped off the sentence by the Supreme Court).
CM reveals that it has received a video from Fonseca, in which she says she is ‘innocent’ of any wrongdoing.
The paper has been to the addresses where she was thought to be living – her father’s home in the Algarve, and an apartment in Lisbon, to hear that no one has seen Fonseca for at least six months.
What this story highlights is how the justice system in Portugal lends itself to felons absconding as they are often able to remain in freedom when ‘appealing’ custodial sentences. ND
