A court in the province of Cadiz, has sentenced a local handyman to 12 and a half years in prison for the murder of a British expat widow after a dispute over money.
The court heard that 71 year old Lesley Anne Pearson was buried in lime, under a cane field in the grounds of her own house in the Cadiz village of Algar, after her gardener, Francisco Javier BP, strangled her to death.
The 47-year old man identified as Francisco Javier, was arrested in July 2019 and as the Civil Guard located the victims body.
The court heard that the arrested man was interrogated twice but did not confess until he could no longer support his alibi.
He was sentenced for pre-meditated murder with aggravating circumstances and the courts also ordered that he pay compensation to the victim’s brother of €24,000.
The victim was well known among the 1,400 inhabitants of Algar, in the Sierra de Cadiz, where she and her late husband had moved to in the early 2000s.
After being widowed, Pearson to a smaller property in Estepona- and visited her Algar home only occasionally which was the case on the day of her murder.
She had planned to meet a friend in town after meeting the accused who acted as a handyman and looked after the property in her absence.
However the meeting led to an argument over how much money was owed for his services.
Javier, whose hobbies included martial arts and boxing grabbed the victim by her neck and strangled her.
After killing her, he carried the body into a room and covered it with a duvet. The next day, he returned, tied the woman’s body with ropes, and buried it in lime, covered over with earth and wooden boards in a reed bed on the plot.
The gardener began to sell belongings from the victim’s house and, in one of those transactions, he told a buyer, one of the neighbours, that a dog had tried to attack him and he had buried it in the cane field on the property.
This witness repeated the story to the authorities and Javier confessed to the crime when the officers went with him to the place where he allegedly had buried the animal.
