“He killed her, dismembered her, made her ugly and discarded her in a sewer”: the femicide from the grinder, to the bench

Waldo Servián Riquelme spends his days in the Ezeiza prison

Waldo Servián Riquelme is 37 years old and is accused of one of the most brutal femicides in modern Argentine history: he murdered, divided into 25 parts with a grinder and even cooked the remains of his partner and mother of his two children, Mirtha Liliana González Ayala (37), in 2019 at his home in Barrio 31 de Retiro. More than two years later, he will sit in the dock to face a trial where he could face life in prison.

Servián Riquelme, who comes to the debate arrested and with preventive detention, faces an accusation for the “homicide doubly aggravated by the bond and by mediating gender violence.” In the request for elevation to trial, the prosecutor who instructed the case, Andrés Madrea, addressed the gender perspective and argued that the defendant had with his concubine “a special zeal for her status as a woman.”

“The defendant here killed her, dismembered her, made her ugly, discarded her in a sewer, trying to eliminate even the smallest female image,” the prosecutor stressed in the opinion accessed by the news agency Telam.

Mirtha Liliana González Ayala was 37 years old and had two children, ages 8 and 11

The femicide occurred between Saturday, March 16, 2019, in the house that the couple shared in Manzana 110 of Barrio 31 bis of the City of Buenos Aires. For the prosecutor, Servián Riquelme planned to leave his children in the care of his family the afternoon before the crime to “be alone with the victim before, during and after killing him.”

The relationship between the femicide and his victim, both of Paraguayan nationality, was over and the motive for the crime, according to the prosecution, was that they had a dispute over the sale of the house, something that the defendant already wanted to which Mirtha denied. Details of the macabre crime scene encountered by the City Police 24 hours after the murder appear in the request for elevation to trial.

A pot with “sectioned remains that had been subjected to a cooking process”, an electric oven and a kitchen knife with traces of blood, the “angle grinder” with its cutting discs inside a bucket -tool used to tear the corpse to pieces – are some of the items that were found in the kitchen.

The femicide in the house that the couple shared in Villa 31 bis

According to the hypothesis of the prosecutor who instructed the case, Andrés Madrea, the bathroom was the place chosen by Servián Riquelme to “carry out his criminal plan”, while González Ayala was showering, and the place where he later dismembered the body during a period “from two to three hours”, according to the estimation of the experts. To do this, Servián Riquelme even took the trouble to disassemble the toilet and vanity, which were found in an adjoining room with his fingerprints.

“Inside the bathtub, parts of a dismembered human body were found, including the head of the victim that was shaved with signs of smoking on the scalp and with amputated ears,” the text reads. Meanwhile, on the top floor of the house, which was under renovation, “partially cooked human remains were found scattered on the floor and inside a bucket.”

The prosecutor Madrea also stated that “the autopsy concluded that as a result of the dismemberment, 25 individualized body fragments were counted.” It was never known what happened, for example, to the heart or the intestines.

After the crime, Servián Riquelme escaped to Paraguay and was later extradited

The forensics were able to conclude that Mirtha had a blow to the face, that he had three cuts on his left hand – which they classified as “defensive injuries” – and that the probable cause of his death was two stab wounds that the victim had in the “submental region ”.

“The dismemberment, shaving, extraction of the ear pavilions, cooking and delivery of the remains (…) not only reveal the apparent intention to get rid of all this in pursuit of their impunity, but also highlight the hatred and total contempt of whoever was his concubine, with an outstanding and singular but calculated and sadistic manifestation of anger, “said the prosecutor.

Hours after the crime, the defendant managed to remain a fugitive for 50 days after fleeing by bus to Misiones, from where he crossed into Paraguay. Finally, he surrendered on October 31, 2019, was extradited and was imprisoned in the Ezeiza prison. When questioned, he denied the accusation and only said that he gave himself up for his children and his family.

This Monday, at 9.30, the trial against Servián Riquelme will begin, which will have another two days -on November 8 and 15- before the Oral Criminal Court No. 14, composed of judges Hugo Norberto Cataldi, Domingo Luis Altieri and Silvia Estela Mora. The accusation will be in the hands of the prosecutor Fernando Klappenbach, and the defense, of the lawyer José Vera.

Meanwhile, the complaint of the mother of the victim, María Lucía Ayala Insfrán, will be in charge of the lawyers Pablo Rovatti and Victoria Hernández Lehmann, both from the Legal Assistance and Sponsorship Program for Crime Victims of the Office of the General Defender of the Nation.

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They prosecuted the femicide from the Villa 31 grinder: he dismembered his partner into 25 parts and cooked them A corpse without a heart: the grotesque crime scene of the Villa 31 ripper They asked that the Villa 31 ripper be sent to trial Macabre finding in Villa 31 bis: a woman was dismembered and they are looking for her husband

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