For the first time, entering the courtroom to witness the trial for the crime of María Marta García Belsunce (50) was chaotic. The large number of crowded people waiting to enter was due to the fact that on this day the widower Carlos Carrascosa (77) will testify.
This is the third trial to investigate who killed the sociologist and it is the first in which the widower is not accused. On this occasion he is particularly affected. Carrascosa arrived at the San Isidro courts at 10:15 am together with the creators of a blog – who were key to defending her innocence – María Luján Falsetti and Jorgelina Fernández.
The widower entered the courtroom at 11, wearing a blue jacket, jeans and a light blue striped shirt. Without the cane that he usually uses and with glasses. Meanwhile, Nicolás Pachelo (46) looked at the floor and with a new notebook and pen in hand. He just looked up when Carrascosa began to testify. At no time during the day did he stop frowning.
“I have been waiting for this moment for 20 years, of being a particular victim and being in front of my wife’s murderer,” Carrascosa declared as soon as he sat on the witness stand.
In the middle of the witness statement of María Marta’s widower, Pachelo’s Instagram account was activated, a topic that brought controversy and was discussed in one of the hearings. At that moment, the main accused of the crime was not with his cell phone in hand. Someone, in his name, uploaded a story.
“Today Carlos Carrascosa declares. We are very anxious to hear his words. Let’s hope it is a sincere statement, really, and not a contribution to this absurd show. What do you think he is going to say?”closed, in survey format.
Nicolás Pachelo, at the hearing this Friday, in which Carlos Carrascosa testifies. Photo: Luciano Thieberger.
Then he began to tell how he met the victim, who was already studying sociology at the time. “A month after we started dating, I asked her to marry me. She was scared because she was 18 years old. Only after three months did she answer me,” she explained.
Carrascosa was also accompanied by the victim’s brother, Horacio García Belsunce, the son of “Pichi” Taylor, Miguel “Michael” Taylor, the couple’s friend Nicolás González del Cerro and his wife, and criminal lawyer Fernando Díaz Canton.
Prosecutor Patricio Ferrari quickly asked the witness to talk about the day of the crime. On October 27, 2002, after seeing the River-Boca game at the house of his brother-in-law, Guillermo Bártoli, he stayed to watch the next game. By that time, María Marta had gone to her house by bicycle because her tennis match had been canceled due to the rain.
“At 6:47 p.m. it’s Independiente’s goal, I stay five more minutes and go to Taylor’s, there were no cars, so I turn back and continue home. When I’m about to enter and turn, I see that the melex (vehicle used by security guards) allegedly with Ortiz,” he said.
While Carrascosa got up with difficulty to mark on a map the path he took to go from Bártoli’s to his house, Pachelo spoke with his historic lawyer Roberto Ribas. Unlike the previous hearings, this time he was next to him and not his new lawyer, Raquel Pérez Iglesias.
Carrascosa confirmed that he had gone to his house minutes before the masseuse Beatriz Michelini arrived to keep the dog “because she always jumped.”
Post on Pachelo’s Instagram account while Carrascosa testified as a witness in the trial for the crime of María Marta,
“When I entered the house, the dog was kept. I go to the other side of the house, cross the living room and go to where María Marta’s office was,” he explained. And she explained how she found the victim.
“I see that the glass in the bedroom was fogged up and there I ran to the bathroom. I found María Marta lying face down and I see a small blood stain next to the toilet and blood in the bathtub. I take her out and put her half body in the bedroom and her legs in the bathroom,” he said.
He linked the accident that his mother had with the situation in which he saw his wife: “My mother began to die in the bathroom too, that’s why when I saw María Marta she was an entity.” The witness explained that the woman drank two muscats on an empty stomach and then she went to the bathroom. “In one of those, there was a step in the bathroom, she went forward and hit her head. I did not see that image, but it worked in my subconscious,” she said.
“I thought he had been hit and drowned”Carrascosa explained about what crossed his mind when he saw his wife.
The widower also shot the prosecutor who was investigating the case at the beginning: “Molina Pico is the main culprit in all this. He is useless. He came to my house with Gastaldi and they didn’t even talk to me. Regrettable the performance of that boy, or great already “.
Horacio García Belsunce, brother of María Marta, accompanied Carrascosa this Friday to the San Isidro courts. Photo: Luciano Thieberger.
At this hearing, which was the largest, all the defendants’ lawyers were present. The three official defenders of the former security guard José Ortiz (41) and the two lawyers of the other former security guard Norberto Glennon (53) were present, as were the three Pachelo attorneys.
The years he spent in jail
Carrascosa re-entered the same room where he was tried in 2007 and ended up convicted of aggravated cover-up. This third trial for the case has Carrascosa as a private victim for the first time, after 20 years in which he was first suspected, charged, arrested, released, tried, convicted and finally acquitted.
In the trial to which he was subjected in 2007, the Oral Criminal Court (TOC) 6, in a divided ruling, sentenced him to five and a half years in prison for covering up his wife’s crime, he was detained for more than 40 days. But in 2009 the Court of Cassation sentenced him to life imprisonment as the author of aggravated homicide and sent him to jail.
Carrascosa was imprisoned for more than seven yearsfirst between June 2009 and February 2015 in the Campana prison, and from then until December 2016 with house arrest and electronic ankle bracelet in an Escobar country, at which time, after several instances of appeal from his defense, another Cassation chamber reversed the conviction and acquitted him.
The acquittal ruling was confirmed first in 2018 by the Buenos Aires Supreme Court of Justice, and definitively in 2020 when the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation rejected the last appeal that the Buenos Aires Public Prosecutor’s Office had presented.
GL