#solved murder

Sini Ruohonen was a 25 year old mother for two boys (ages 1 and 3) and a wife to her 31 year old husband Antti Samuli Ruohonen. They lived in a farm in Pöytyä where they kept dogs, cats, chickens and sheep. They had met back in 2015 via their mutual friend, and they got married the next year. Their marriage seemed happy and balanced, and according to their closed ones there was never any violence. The couple however were pretty different and the differences in their personalities came clear already at the start of their relationship. Sini was described as being very outspoken, humorous, cheerful and she had a strong will. Antti was quiet, calm, trustworthy and kind and he kept his distance. Family friends have told that Sini was very dominant and overbearing towards Antti, and that he usually was very compliant. Some of the friends also told that they hadn't seen Antti smiling much for the past four years. “He was tired and walked like a zombie”. According to the friends his behavior had changed in the past couple years, but he was never aggressive or violent.

In September 2020 during weekend Sini's family couldn't get a hold of her. She didn't answer her phone and nobody knew where she was. When the relatives asked if Antti knew, he told that Sini had left their home after an argument. Witnesses told Antti's voice had been hoarse and it sounded like he had been crying. Eventually Sini's relatives pressured him on making a missing person's report on Monday, 14th of September. The police published information about Sini and she was searched around their property with sniffer dogs.

On Thursday, 17th of September the police arrested Antti, suspecting that he killed Sini. Antti had told the police that Sini didn't answer her phone, but eventually the police found out Sini's phone was completely shut down. Antti's behavior, inconsistency in the things he told raised the suspicion towards him, and also Sini's relatives told that disappearing just like this would've not been possible. After two days of his arrest, Antti confessed on killing Sini.

On 11th of September 2020 during the day Sini had called Antti and accused him of taking her wallet. Later it was found from Sini's bag. When Antti arrived home Sini had left to collect mushrooms and after getting back home she had started to bake a pie. It was Antti's job to make porridge for their two young boys in the evening, and when this happened Sini had complained how it was way too tough again.

“When I arrived home I found the wallet in her bag. Sini thought it was hilarious.”

After the kids were put to bed for the night, Sini and Antti had been in the living room. According to Antti he had tried to discuss the fight they had had but Sini didn't want to. After some time Sini had went to bed. Antti told the investigators that he had waited for about 30 minutes, thinking things over and then joined Sini in their bedroom.

When he went to the bedroom he started to strangle Sini and continued even when they both fell off from the bed. After Sini died, Antti fetched a computer cord and finished off choking her with it. Their 1 year old son was sleeping in the same room while all this happened. The 3 year old son was also in the house. When Sini died, she was 20 weeks pregnant with their third child.

"I stayed in the living room, the tv was on but I didn't watch it. I sat there and thought about things. Then I walked in the bedroom and strangled her."

After this Antti wrapped Sini's body in a carpet and took the body out and moved it to a swamp area with his tractor, located about 4 kilometers (2 miles) away from their home. He buried the body and then went back home. He shut Sini's phone and later also buried it at the same area.

(The phone was found from near the buildings, and Sini's body was found from where the arrow is pointing.)

Antti doesn't have criminal past. He is deeply regretful for what he did. He still hasn't been able to give any motive for the killing other than “getting fed up”. Sini's sister has been suspecting if he had been planning it for longer time: he lied to everybody's faces and hid the body. According to her if a man kills his wife by accident, he wouldn't be able to continue his life normally after it.

Antti told the police that he had snapped. The last things he had been thinking about before going to the bedroom was all the fights they had had during the week and during that day.

"I was overwhelmed by uncontrollable hatred. All the grudges and things left unsaid came to my mind. I lost all control. My hatred was repressed. At that moment I didn't feel anything, but afterwards I have felt remorse and self loathing."

Hello and welcome back to the Crime She Wrote blog!

First off, I’d like to apologize for the delay in delivering this post. The information presented here has been out for about three weeks and although I’ve had this written for a while there has been internet connection issues preventing me from actually posting. But now it’s all back to normal so here’s what you came here for!

 If you’re unaware of the main details of this case or haven’t heard about it at all, you can read my first post here.

Since his arrest, more information about Sandro’s confession of Valentina’s murder was revealed; according to the girl’s father, he tortured the her by dipping her feet and legs in boiling water (which not only is horrible in itself, but the reason why he chose boiling water was because as a toddler Valentina had an accident with water and developed a fear of it), and hitting her trying to force her into confessing to have being sexually abused by one of her mother’s friends. Along with it, he tried to suffocate her with his own hands, but Valentina’s passing was caused by one strong hit to her head, allegedly a slap, that led to an internal hemorrhage that caused a seven minute long convulsion and, consequently, her death. Sandro laid Valentina on the couch, covering her with a blanket, and told the other children in the house that the girl had a stomachache and was resting. According to the known timeline, her death occurred in the morning and her dead body would lay in that couch until late at night.

It’s unclear if Marcia was at home as Valentina was being violently tortured, since there are contradicting information: some sources claim she was at home the whole time, other sources say she only arrived home after the girl was already dead. But according to the first version of events, as the torturing happened, Marcia would have ignored every call for help, and would only approached the child during and after the convulsion to make sure she was still alive and breathing. 

It’s also still unclear if the murder was a premeditated act or an “accidental side effect” of the physical abuse, but we do know that hiding the body was premeditated. At 10pm on the 6th of May, footage of a gas station security camera caught Marcia driving the family car, with Sandro sitting next to her, and presumably Valentina’s already dead body on the back seat, in direction to Serra D’El Rei, where her body was found four days later. Since the autopsy reports her time of death in the morning, an entire afternoon was spent planning how to dispose of the body.

According to their version of events, once they reached the destination, Sandro left the car with Valentina’s body and Marcia drove back to town. During this time, she had time to call the authorities about what was happening, in the case of her being coerced and threatened to comply, but she didn’t, which leads the police to doubt her claim of not being apart of killing the girl.

During these past weeks, Valentina’s former stepfather, a 42 year old man named Nelson, reached the media to claim there was evidence of abuse and negligence at the child’s father’s house. Nelson, who lived with Valentina’s mother until the girl was 6 years old, claims that the few times Valentina went to her father’s house she always came back bruised and with lice and fleas. He says Valentina was like a daughter to him, which led him to tattoo her name on his arm when they still lived together, and says he doesn’t understand why and how Sonia, her mother, would send her away to her father’s house for two months knowing all the abuse history.

Following this, the Child Protection Services team that evaluated the family and closed their case by writing on their report that there was no sign of negligence or any other kind of abuse, back in 2019 when Valentina ran away from her father’s house where she was staying during Easter break, is under investigation for failing to note the signs of an abusive home.

Five days after his arrest, on the 15th of May, Sandro was admitted to the hospital following a suicide attempt. Even though his cell was cleared of every object that could have been used to attempt against his life (considering he was a high profile suicide risk prisoner due to the nature of the crime), he still managed to break the toilet seat and use one of the sharp pieces of ceramic to cut both of his arms, although, according to the doctors, in a non-life threatening way. This leads us to believe that his suicide attempt was not related to mental illness (such as depression, for example) or guilt, but a means of manipulation, maybe to fake regret or claim insanity in the future trial.

On the 20th he was transported back to the prison, where he stays to this day under suicide watch, awaiting trial.

The police have until September to conclude the investigation, which will then be transferred to court for trial.

We don’t know how or when this will end, or if more information will be released once a sentence is given, and knowing how slow the justice system is in Portugal, it may take years until this case is fully closed. But until then, keep it in your minds, don’t let Valentina’s memory die and hope that justice is made.

14 year old Alice Gross left her home in Hanwell, Ealing, England at 1pm on August 28th 2014. She told her parents she would be home later that evening, but she never returned. 

The search operation launched was the largest deployment of Metropolitan police officers since the 7/7 London bombing attack eleven years earlier.  

Colette Arman was a 16-year-old British girl. She was working as a trainee hairdresser in Nottingham.

Colette left her house on 30th October 1983 just after 8 pm to walk to her boyfriend's home, usually, he collected her but his car was unavailable. Colette was last seen at about 8.10 pm where she stopped to talk to a group of friends. Witnesses reported hearing a woman screaming and a car speeding off shortly afterwards. When Colette did not arrive at her boyfriend's house and could not be found the police were called to help her frantic family and friends with their search. The search for Colette came to a tragic end when the next morning her nude body was found dumped in a field. She had been raped and strangled.

A murder investigation hunting for Colette's killer was launched immediately and a reconstruction of her last known movements was aired on Crimewatch. Despite 400 tip-offs and 1500 potential suspects, no leads were found and the killer remained unapprehended. The case was shown again on Crimewatch in 2004.

In 2008, advances in forensic technology allowed police to put together a profile of the murderer's DNA and began to rule out suspects with mouth swabs.

In June 2008, Jean-PPaul Hutchinson was arrested on a motor charge. DNA swabs were taken and he was found to be a match to Colette's killer however Jean-Paul was only 20 years old and therefore was not even born when Colette was murdered. Paul Stewart Hutchinson, Jean-Paul's father, was arrested and charged with murder. After an initial not guilty plea he changed his plea to guilty on 21st December 2009.

Amanda Jane ‘Milly’ Dowler was a 13-year-old British schoolgirl who went missing in 2002, 6 months later her remains were found in Yateley Heath Woods.

Milly was seen walking home from school on 21st March 2002, when she failed to return home she was reported missing to the police, no witnesses had seen a struggle despite Milly last being seen at 4.08pm on a busy street in broad daylight. Police initially suspected Milly may have run away. Despite multiple searches and huge amounts of reward money being offered there were still no signs of Milly, in June 2002 police told her parents she was probably dead.

On 18th September 2002 human remains were discovered in a wooded area of Hampshire, dental records confirmed them to be Milly’s however due to the severity of the decomposition no cause of death could be established. None of Milly’s possessions were ever recovered.

For my very first post, I chose to cover the ongoing case of Valentina Fonseca’s death, a 9 year old Portuguese girl, that has been taking the attention of the country, and hopefully shed some light on it internationally.

Valentina Fonseca, pictured above, lived with her mother, Sonia Fonseca, in the town of Bombarral. Since March, when the Covid-19 quarantine started, her mother sent her to stay with her 32 year old father, Sandro Bernardo, her 38 year old step-mother, Marcia, and three other children: a 12 year old boy (Marcia’s son from a previous relationship), a 4 year old and a 7 month old, both the latter girls from the couple’s current relationship, in the town of Atouguia da Baleia. Both towns are around 21km apart (13 miles).

On May 7th 2020 at 8:30am, Valentina’s father contacted local police authority GNR (National Republican Guard) claiming his daughter went missing overnight. According to his first report, he saw her last during the previous night at around 1am when he went to tuck her in after sending her to sleep at around 11pm. He then claimed going to bed with his partner, waking up at 8am and realizing the girl was gone when he went to wake her up. As this happened, Marcia was going to local public places, namely a café, with a picture of the girl asking people if they had seen her.

The GNR immediately filed a missing person’s report, called the Judiciary Police to take over the investigation and started the searches for the girl. A neighbor living on the same street claimed to see a red pickup truck that she did not recognize as belonging to anyone in town stopped near the family’s house at around 1:30am, hinting at a possible kidnapping. Marcia claimed that she had forgotten to lock the front door, and Sandro claimed that Valentina was a sleepwalker (which was not confirmed by any doctor or family member). Therefore, both the father and some family members proposed the possibility of Valentina having ran away during the night, considering all this and that she had ran away once in the previous year: in 2019, when Valentina was 8 years old and staying at her father’s house for Easter break, she left home early in the morning, only to be found by a policeman wandering around a street by herself; after questioning her, she said she missed her mom and was going back home to see her. After this incident, CPCJ (Child Protection Services) opened an investigation to assess the possibility of negligence or any other type of maltreatment, only to close the case after a couple of months claiming no evidence of maltreatment existed within the family. 

Some family members, however, did not believe that Valentina could have taken off during the night since the girl was very afraid of the dark. 

The searches on that same day didn’t result in anything, so they continued them on the next day, the 8th of May, now not only with searching dogs, but also with the help of drones equipped with heat sensors. Several law enforcement agents and firemen participated in the search. Still, to no avail. 

On the 9th of May, Saturday, several volunteers from all over the country joined the searches nonstop. In total, more than 600 people were looking for the missing girl in a 6km radius (around 4 miles). On that afternoon two pieces of child clothing were found: unidentified girl clothes found in the early afternoon, and a child’s jacket found in the evening. The police did not release the places where the clothing was found, therefore not releasing the distance between both findings. They showed the newly found items to Valentina’s parents, that didn’t recognize the items as belonging to the girl. Nevertheless, both findings were filed as evidence and attempts to connect them with the child were made.

During this whole process, the parents and stepmother never participated on the search. Sandro would stay at home, leaving only to visit the police station to ask if there was more information on the girl’s whereabouts. 

On the morning of May 10th, Valentina’s body was found covered in bushes branches in an open field 6km (4 miles) away from the family’s house. 

According to the press conference given on the same day, an accidental death was immediately discarded when they saw the body and it was strongly believed to be a murder case. At this point, no other information was given except that both Sandro and Marcia were in police custody. 

Today, May 11th, it was released that the discovery of the body happened thanks to an interrogation that lasted the entire night from the 9th to the 10th, in which Sandro was pressured to confess, with the police having strong evidence that he and Marcia were the culprits. The Judiciary Police did not release to the public which evidence led to the arrest of both adults of the family, other than Marcia’s 12 year old son’s testimony of what happened in the house that past Wednesday.

During his confession, Sandro claimed to Valentina accidentally dying on Wednesday, the 6th, while he was bathing the girl. According to his version of the story, he was forcing Valentina to confess to being sexually abused due to hearing rumors about it, when she had a convulsion and died. He also claimed that Marcia, the step-mother, was not present in the bathroom at that time and did not participate in hiding the body. 

However, the unnamed 12 year old boy told a different story. According to him, he saw both Sandro and Marcia walk inside the bathroom with Valentina, never to see her walk out again. When both adults came out by themselves, they told the boy to go to bed and that would be, according to what we know, the last thing he witnessed before the incidents on the 7th. 

By 8pm on the 11th, the preliminary autopsy report was released, claiming that Valentina died under extreme violence and had clear signs of abuse in her body. 

In the evening of May 11, what we know is that Valentina Fonseca was murdered in her own home, by the hands of her own father, her dead body placed in the back seat of the couple’s green Renault Scenic and dumped in a remote area. After four days of ceaseless searching, her body was found in such a condition that the possibility of accidental death was immediately discarded. We know that Sandro and Marcia were arrested under the charges of qualified murder, body concealment, amongst other yet unreleased crimes, and should be presented to a judge on the 12th. And in the light of what we know, we ask that justice be made. We ask that, in a country where the longest prison sentence is 25 years, that’s what they get. 

I am aware that this isn’t a fascinating serial killer case, or a mysterious unsolved case. But this is the case of a sweet little girl whose life was cut short by those of her own blood. It deserves the same attention. It deserves the same justice. She deserves to be remembered. 

There are, however, points in the story that need to be clarified. What exactly is the relation between the neighbor who, most likely,  falsely claimed to have seen a red pickup truck near the house (considering there is factual evidence of the Valentina’s body being transported in the family car? Where does the mother stand in this story? Was she aware of abuse towards her daughter and still forced her to stay with her father? Were the clothes found during the search actual evidence or were they fake leads to distract the investigation? There are some of the questions that I hope to see answered in the near future.

If there’s anything you’d like to add or say, feel free to reblog with your comment!