The “tattoo butcher” from Valdemoro, accused of murdering a young woman in October 2018 and mutilating her body, he hides behind his cocaine addiction and his traumatic childhood who lived with a father who had been with prostitutes for 7 years to excuse the brutal crime and defend that it was reckless homicide.
The Provincial Court of Madrid has started the trial this morning with the selection of the popular jury that will determine the circumstances in which the murder occurred. In this first session, the prosecutor and the lawyers have exposed the previous allegations at the beginning of the witness phase. This Wednesday the defendant will testify in court.
The prosecutor requests 25 years and five months in jail for Leonardo VJ, a Colombian national and 27 years old at the time of the crime, for the crimes of murder and desecration of corpse. The defendant mutilated the body of the young woman, whose face, breasts and tattoos that she had made months before were cut off by him to put them in brine as trophies.
“I had a drug problem”
The defense lawyer, lawyer García Marcos, maintains that his client perpetrated the events under the influence of drugs, for which he requests that he be sentenced to three years in prison for a crime of reckless homicide with the extenuation of addictions. “I had a drug problem”has said.
“As he said, it got out of hand. He had a very serious cocaine problem detected by the National Institute of Toxicology and, between the cocaine intake and the head, it was gone. He is a boy with a very sad life. At the age of seven, his father took him as prostitutes and the social services of Valdemoro had to catch him on the street”, he stressed.
Instead, the lawyer representing the family requests that he be sentenced to reviewable permanent imprisonment for the vulnerability of the girl he killed, who had previously been the victim of serious crimes. He requests three years in prison for her ex-partner for cover up the crime.
It was the defendant’s ex-girlfriend who alerted the Civil Guard that he had helped Leonardo dispose of a corpse, which led to his arrest. The man lived in Valdemoro and called himself “the tattoo butcher” on social networks.
The events occurred on the night of October 15, 2019 when the defendant received 18-year-old ECL at his home in Valdemoro, whom he knew from having done some tattoos on him on previous dates as well as from supplying him with non-prescription drugs.
She consumed beer and drugs
Inside the house, and for a long time, the young woman drank several beers and took pills of a drug called Rivotril in the master bedroom on the first floor.
Then, “taking advantage of the state of drowsiness in which she found herself due to the consumption of substances”, between two and three in the morning of the 16th, he “suddenly” positioned himself behind the young woman and put his arm around the neck of the victim with the intent to drown him.
After a few minutes of not achieving his goal, LVJ decided to change his plan and tried to do so, also without success, with a wire “because of his inability to sufficiently squeeze the victim’s neck.”
mutilated body with a scalpel
It was then that he used a knife that he stuck in the abdomen of the victim while continuing to choke her with the cable held in one hand, which caused the death of the young woman.
After killing him, he moved his body to the bathroom bathtub in the main residence of the house, “and there, using a scalpelcut the areolas of the victim’s breasts and made an incision from the navel in the shape of a “Y” towards each of the two clavicles, emulating a picture of his property where there is a woman with the same tattoos that he presented”.
Subsequently, the defendant cut out the young woman’s face as well as the two tattoos that he himself had made months before on the aforementioned body, a dagger and a rose, and placed them in brine in order to preserve them as trophies.
The defendant remains in pretrial detention situation following an order issued by the Investigating Court No. 4 of Valdemoro.
