Luis Lorenzo, a television heartthrob, presenter of shows with Raffaella Carrá and Bárbara Rey, soap opera protagonist, supporting actor in well-known series, and reality show contestant, has been stuck in the role of the accused in real life for five years. At 66, sitting in the dock alongside his 50-year-old wife, Arancha Palomino, he witnesses the unraveling of his life as narrated by others.
Although they were initially accused of murder for the death of Isabel Suárez Arias, Arancha’s aunt, who died at the couple’s home in June 2021 at the age of 85, this week they appeared before the Provincial Court of Madrid only as alleged perpetrators of a crime of abuse and disloyal administration, he finally in the capacity of “necessary cooperator.” The Prosecutor’s Office is asking for six years in prison for them, while the private prosecution, representing the deceased’s Asturian family, is requesting 10 years, as they believe there is also a crime of “illegal detention.”
The strenuous attempts by their defense lawyers to downplay these accusations, and their own efforts to present themselves as victims of a police plot first and a socio-media one later, have abruptly clashed with an infinity of testimonies that have exposed their intimacy and raised reasonable suspicions about their intentions with the elderly woman.
In their report, the Civil Guard investigators conclude that they took Aunt Isabel to live with them in March 2021 with the aim of seizing her inheritance. The woman, a widow with no children, and until then happy, dynamic, and autonomous in the village, died on June 28 of that same year at the couple’s home in Rivas Vaciamadrid. In three months, with a dizzying deterioration and crammed with pills.
Relatives and friends from Grado, Asturias, the village where the woman lived all her life, claim that they took Sabela under false pretenses, as she told them she was leaving because “Arancha had asked her to help her with the children for a few days.” They never saw her again.
The couple stated in court that they moved her to Madrid for pending medical tests, following a previous visit to the capital in August 2020, where she was diagnosed with “incipient cognitive deterioration.” However, Isabel, a woman of good stature, who then weighed nearly 80 kilos and walked to and from her garden, and from the garden took the train to sell her products at the Oviedo market, already had an appointment—arranged by her Asturian general practitioner—for a CT scan at the Central University Hospital of Asturias (HUCA). She never went.
A few days after arriving in Madrid, in early March 2021, during the last throes of Covid, her niece Arancha took Isabel to a doctor at a private clinic and explained her aunt’s “tremors” and “forgetfulness.” “She confused euros and pesetas,” “she could no longer flip a potato omelet,” she justified in court. But that medical appointment was followed by more than a dozen in a month and a half, with more than 30 different medication prescriptions, and without Arancha informing the different doctors (public and private, from health centers, hospitals, in person and by phone…) of the previous consultations. She accumulated prescriptions and medication for antipsychotics and neuroleptics.
All these doctors paraded through the courtroom this week and made at least one thing clear: the person who always spoke on Isabel’s behalf was her niece, who stated what was happening to her and requested help to alleviate her symptoms. “The problem with medical visits is that they end up being part of the abuse, obtaining prescriptions everywhere and creating chaos in her medication… There was an enormous amount of substances that were not necessary to take and could have pernicious effects on the deceased,” the prosecutor stated in her closing arguments.
To the natural disorientation of an 85-year-old person taken out of context, an uncontrolled administration of pills was added. “Take your medication!” a neighbor claimed to hear Arancha shouting from her house. The caregivers hired a month after Isabel settled in the couple’s home, when her rapid deterioration was already evident, recounted all kinds of humiliating situations: “They made her go down to the communal garage bathroom to relieve herself so she wouldn’t leave an odor in the house,” “there was hardly any food in the fridge,” “she slept in a child’s bed, almost at ground level,” “Arancha was in charge of the medication,” “she barely had any clothes,” “the children kicked her legs and laughed.” Isabel was wasting away. When she died, prostrate in that “little house-shaped” child’s bed, she weighed just over 50 kilos.
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The chilling account of the caregivers and the managers of the companies that employed them coincides with that provided by neighbors of the building, who found the woman in a bathrobe and pajamas in the hallway going up or down to the bathroom. Or with that of the VIPS waitresses, who on one occasion had to call the police because they left the elderly woman on the terrace at 12:00 and did not return for her until 21:00. They went to celebrate one of their children’s birthdays at Warner, they explained in court. “She didn’t feel like coming,” Arancha said. “She was free, she could do what she wanted, she wanted to stay because she wasn’t going to get on any rides, she had her money, her phone… nothing like this had ever happened to her before,” justified the niece, whom the cafeteria employees called insistently, but she claimed to have left her phone forgotten in the car.
“We saw an elderly woman asleep at the table, we woke her up, gave her something to eat, asked her where her family was and she said she was waiting for them to celebrate a birthday,” several of the restaurant chain’s saleswomen recounted. “Her phone barely had any charge and she spoke of wanting to return to Asturias,” another added.
In parallel to the neglect, mistreatment, and overmedication that Aunt Isabel seems to have received in her last three months of life in Madrid, the couple managed—between visits to doctors and hospitals in Madrid—to have the elderly woman sign a modification of her will, making Arancha the main heir to her assets: the house in Grado and her savings (about 150,000 euros), and leaving her siblings some rural properties in Asturias. They also managed to have the elderly woman sign a power of attorney with which they drained her bank account, with the justification that the cash withdrawals and transfers were for “her care.”
“The elderly woman has very little time left and we want to withdraw 10,000 euros,” Lorenzo wrote to his manager asking how they could withdraw it from her account. The couple even traveled to Asturias to try to find out how much money Aunt Isabel had in a fixed-term deposit over which they had not managed to gain power.
“Everything is false,” Arancha and Luis Lorenzo repeated over and over again in court regarding what was reported by relatives, caregivers, employees, and neighbors. They only gave credibility to the statement of the last caregiver, Elisabeth Vaca, who stayed with them for the last weeks of Isabel’s life, after disassociating herself from the company she belonged to, and who is also charged in this procedure as a cooperator. She assured that “they treated Isabel with affection,” that they loved her and gave her everything she needed, quite the opposite of what she told her company coordinator before leaving it and reaching a direct work agreement with Arancha and Luis.
According to the accused and their lawyers, behind this entire judicial procedure there is only hatred and a desire for profit on the part of Isabel’s siblings in Asturias, who were the ones who ended up filing a complaint against Arancha with the Civil Guard, due to the impossibility of communicating with the elderly woman and after receiving constant snubs from the niece to their calls. “We tried to contact her on numerous occasions without success. I myself, who we have always gotten along well, called Arancha, pleaded with her, and she told me not to call her again and that she was taking care of everything our aunt needed… She has always been a pathological liar, and even so we maintained the relationship, even after her mother’s death in 2009, when she says all the family quarrels began. It’s not true,” says María Suárez, showing a family photo at the courthouse door. “Arancha has never worked and has always wanted to live beyond her means. Her own father, whom she has despite saying in court that she has no family, wants nothing to do with her, because she already tried to take everything from him while he was alive,” she adds.
That complaint in April 2021 is the genesis of a police investigation that ended with the couple’s arrest on May 25, 2022, followed by the entire judicial process that culminated this week, and which has left Luis Lorenzo and Arancha Palomino awaiting sentencing.
