“Valentina was a great person, she was more of a heart than a human being.” This is how her best friend remembers Valentina Trespalacios, the 21-year-old DJ, who was found dead this sunday inside a suitcase in a garbage container in the town of Fontibón, in the west of Bogotá.
In conversation with Colprensa, this woman who prefers to withhold her name for security reasons, recalls that Valentina and John Poulos, a man of American nationality and who had been her partner for several months, met over the Internet and had only seen each other three times.
“The guy was very friendly, very calm, we never noticed anything unusual about him. Communication was a bit complicated because he didn’t know any Spanish, so we always communicated through a translator, but that didn’t stop them from falling in love”, says the DJ’s friend.
The reason why Poulos was in Colombia, according to the woman’s account, was because the second time they met he proposed to her and came to settle with her. “He came to settle here, in Colombia, on Thursday, January 19, they looked for an apartment and moved on Friday the 20th.”
That day she went to work at a nightclub in Bogotá and she went with him and they returned to the apartment in the early hours of the morning. The next day “I spoke to her, she showed me her new apartment through her video call, she told me that she was not going to leave it, and then I lost track of her.”
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Was he jealous?
Yes. According to the source’s account, Poulos had hired an investigator about three months ago to keep track of him, find out what he was doing, where he was going and with whom. “He was a very jealous man, very obsessive. We take it as a joke, we never misunderstand anything.
The woman says that thanks to the fact that her friend left her WhatsApp open on the computer, they have managed to clarify many things. “We are lucky that she left her WhatsApp open on my computer, because thanks to that we have collected too much information, photos, videos, addresses, locations and conversations from them.”
One of these tests would be that the suitcase in which the DJ was wrapped belonged to him and appears in one of those messages.
All this information was turned over to the authorities.
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What is known about the case?
Valentina Trespalacios was found dead this Sunday in a garbage container in the town of Fontibón, in the west of Bogotá.
According to the first versions, Valentina was found dead inside a suitcase, by a recycler who was working in the area.
According to his mother, Laura Hidalgo, they moved to a new apartment on Friday. “She was happy with illusions.”
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The next day, the mother says that they spoke normally, and that she even had a conversation with one of her younger brothers around 10:00 p.m. and showed him around the apartment. “He saw them, they were in their pajamas, until more or less 12:00 at night.”
Legal Medicine determined in a preliminary report that Valentina would have died from mechanical suffocation. For their part, the authorities are on the trail of John Poulos, who is said to have fled the country.
Given what happened, Laura Hidalgo, who went to Legal Medicine in Bogotá to claim her daughter’s body, asked John Poulos to turn himself in and clarify what happened. “I ask you to turn yourself in so that you can clarify my daughter’s case, you were the last one to see her alive,” said Valentina’s mother.