63-year-old woman denies killing her lover and packing his body in a suitcase

Lidia Prilutcaia, 63, who has been accused of killing her lover back in 2015 and stuffing his body in a suitcase, with the aid of a third party, has this week denied the alleged crime in court.

The prosecution argues that the 63-year-old defendant had two lovers, one of whom was the victim, with whom she had a “love relationship”, who she asphyxiated with the help of the unidentified third party in order to conceal her relationship and to keep an ATM card.

At the first trial session in Lisbon the defendant denied any involvement in the crime, revealing that it was the victim, José Lavos, who gave her the ATM card, in an envelope, with the code and another 300 Euros in cash.

The woman began by explaining that the victim had instructed her to use the money when she needed it, because she claims had been burned in an accident at work, but, after being confronted by the judge with the fact that she had emptied his bank account “in three, four withdrawals”, replied that José Lavos had told her to withdraw “all the money”.

The defendant justified spending (760 Euros) on taxis and food expenses, leading the judge to report that her answers “were incongruous and unenlightening”.

Others of the debated points were the reasons behind why Ms. Prilutcaia did not warn neither friends nor the police that José Lavos, who called her daily, did not do so for a week until a family member raised the alarm.

The prosecution argued that the woman “continued to fetch all the money he had. Not calling a friend, not going to his house. It would be normal to worry and report to the police, because he was a friendly person who even helped her. I cannot understand that this lady, realising that something strange was happening, because she received calls every day and stopped receiving them, did not call friends, did not call the police to report the disappearance.”

The woman replied that she had done nothing, asking “what could she do” to report the disappearance. Although the answer seems fairly obvious to most.

At the court’s insistence, the woman added that she wanted to hide her affair and that she was “waiting.”

“You were waiting. And until when? Until the end of time?” the judge, Ana Clara Baptista asked.

The defendant first met José Lavos back in 2012, but stated that only in May of 2015, on her birthday, did she become sexually involved with the victim, “the only time”, classifying their relationship as a friendship.

The 63-year-old is charged with four crimes: qualified homicide, corpse desecration, computer fraud and theft.

Prosecutors have said that “in conjunction with the efforts and implementation of a common plan, at a place and date not specifically determined, but between 10 and 28 August 2015,” the defendant and the accomplice “struck several parts of the body” and asphyxiated the victim to death.

They add that the defendant and the person who assisted her “put José Lavos’s body in a suitcase – black suitcase – and abandoned it in a deserted place on Rua Estrada de Carcavelos, Fontanelas” in the parish of Lousa, municipality of Loures, “inside a hole of rock formations, placing stones on it in order to make their discovery more difficult”.