The Provincial Court of León has sentenced a man who defrauded nearly 300,000 euros from an elderly woman, who suffered from a mental disorder, to seven years in prison, whom he made believe that the money was deposited in the “bank of heaven” in order to build a home there with the victim's mother and husband, now deceased.
As reported this Thursday by legal sources, the victim suffers from an alteration in the content of thought, in the form of mystical-religious and megalomaniacal delusional ideation, which altered, in its entirety, her capacity for judgment and decision, placing her outside of reality. This issue was noticeably accentuated in 2013, becoming more present and altering her cognitive abilities.
The magistrates of the Third Section consider it proven that the accused, aware of the woman's mental state, plotted the possibility of getting hold of all the savings she had deposited in different banking entities.
The subject made the old woman believe, with telephone calls from a hidden number, that “Our Lord Jesus Christ” or the “Virgin Mary” were calling her to ask her to withdraw different amounts of money from her accounts and give them to him to deposit them in the "bank of heaven" or to take them to the store that the accused ran.
The magistrates relate in their resolution that in a massage room in the premises, they told him to put the money in a drawer from which it was transported directly to the "bank of heaven", speeding up the financial management of his "future home." in the "Kingdom of our Lord."
Furthermore, the sentence explains that, to give greater credibility to the "apparitions", the accused staged conversations in his store or on the telephone, changing or altering his voice and making the old woman believe that he was talking to his deceased mother, God or the Virgin Mary.
Not content with extracting all the money from the old woman, the convicted man also pressured her, saying that he was going to kill her children or make the money deposited in heaven disappear if she told them that he was giving her money.
The victim has lost all his savings, leaving only the monthly payments of his small pension, which the accused could not take possession of when he was discovered and reported in time by the victim's children.
