The court has not found a man convicted of the murder of his wife in Collado Villalba for a month

There is no end to the murder of Valentina Chirac. This woman was murdered in her home in 2017. She was found strangled and wrapped in blankets on the floor of her bedroom, in Collado Villalba (Madrid). Her husband, David Arellano, was arrested three days later for the crime, after the funeral. He then went to prison awaiting trial, which came in 2020. That year, the defendant heard the guilty verdict for the first time from the president of a popular jury. That president continued to speak as he descended the stairs of the Provincial Court of Madrid and said that he had changed the direction of his vote so that he could go home earlier. For this reason, the verdict was overturned and the trial was ordered to be repeated. In 2023, another new jury concluded that Arellano was guilty of the murder of his partner with the aggravating circumstance of kinship and gender. Earlier this week, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison. But the court has not found the convicted man for a month.

The local police of Collado Villalba and Galapagar are trying, without success, to find the man sentenced since the end of September to notify him of the measures regarding his minor daughter, which he had with Valentina. But it has been impossible to find him. Now the judge has to decide whether to issue a search and arrest warrant for Arellano to go to prison to serve his sentence. For the time being, in an order to which EL PAÍS has had access, the magistrate has asked the prosecutor and the lawyers to allege what they consider about the "personal situation" of the accused and a decision will be made later.

Arellano went to this year's hearing as a free man because due to the annulment and repetition of the process, the maximum time that the law allows a person to be in pretrial detention without a sentence had expired. On September 27, the jury unanimously found him guilty of murder, but not of sexual assault, exempting him from the possibility of being sentenced to life in prison with review. The ruling states that the police have not been able to locate him at his last address since the 28th.

According to the facts proven by the sentence, the defendant and the victim went to dinner in May 2017 with their friends and when they returned home, in the early hours of the morning, Arellano hit his wife on the head and strangled her until she stopped breathing. "After suffocating Valentina, the defendant manipulated the crime scene in order to simulate that her death had taken place during a robbery at the family home," the ruling states. To support this version, the now condemned man went that morning to a motorcycle circuit, to have a coffee at a bar and stopped by a gas station. When he returned home at noon, he called the emergency services to report that they had broken into the house to steal and murdered his wife.

The Guardia Civil did not believe this version because they did not find any sign of forced entry into the villa, the alarm had not been manipulated and, as they explained in the trial, this is not the modus operandi of a thief. The jury also valued the reports of the court's forensic experts, who ruled that the woman had died in the early hours of the morning, not in the morning, and that she had "fought for her life". The specialists also concluded that the asphyxia occurred when the woman's abilities were diminished as a result of the traumatic brain injury.

For all these reasons, the sentence sentenced Arellano to 22 years in prison, a ruling that his lawyer, Manuel Alonso, has already announced that he was going to appeal. But the judge also banned her from communicating with her daughter for 30 years and stripped her of her parental rights. It is these measures, dealt with in a separate piece, that the police have not been able to officially hand over to the condemned man because they have not located him for a month. The girl is in good condition and cared for by relatives, according to sources close to the case. A decision on the legal status of the convicted person will be made in the coming days.

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