Terrifying screams filled the silence of that early morning in July: little Asunta was trying to get rid of an attacker who, hooded and dressed in black, was trying to strangle her. Seconds later and just as the stranger fled down the hallway, her mother came out to help her and “tried to grab him with unsuccessful results.”
After the events, the girl told what happened to a friend and sent her a photo with finger marks on her neck. Meanwhile, Rosario, in connivance with her husband Alfonso, decided not to report so as not to “cause any type of trauma to her daughter.” However, that decision actually hid a darker objective: to kill Asunta. To do this, they devised an apparently perfect crime: drug the little girl with anxiolytics, asphyxiate her by suffocation, and abandon her body on an embankment.
In June 2001, lawyer Rosario Porto and journalist Alfonso Basterra traveled to China to look for Yong Fang, a baby barely nine months old, whom they named Asunta. For more than two years, the couple, residing in Santiago de Compostela, had been in the international adoption process encouraged by Rosario's family.
Asunta's story had such an impact in the Galician press that even regional television wanted to interview the proud first-time parents. After all, it was the first time in the history of the region that an international adoption of these characteristics took place. The images of that talk on a terrace in the city will always be burned into the retina of society, mainly because of the tragedy that would occur later.
From her earliest years, Asunta stood out for being an intelligent and super gifted girl, she had high abilities and a gift for the piano, ballet and painting. Added to this was a happy and affectionate personality, which she won over those who knew her. Her neighbors, for example, continue to remember her as an “unforgettable being.” And, among her closest relatives, she always drew attention to her special relationship with her maternal grandfather Francisco de ella, to whom she was very close.
The death of Rosario's father while he was sleeping, in July 2012, greatly affected the little girl, who also had to watch over her maternal grandmother six months before. The third emotional setback came on Three Kings Day 2013 when Rosario and Alfonso decided to separate.
What Asunta didn't know is that her father had caught her mother with a lover. This led to the breakup of the marriage and the departure of the journalist from the apartment they shared on Doutor Teixeiro Street to a smaller one just twenty-five meters away. However, apparently nothing had changed because Alfonso continued to take care of the girl.
A few months after the separation, Rosario had to be admitted to the hospital for a neurological problem, a moment that Alfonso took advantage of to ask his wife for a second chance and return home to take care of them both. What was initially intended to unite the family more, turned into a Machiavellian plan where Asunta was left out of the equation. This is how in June of that year Rosario and Alfonso devised how to kill her daughter.
In the months before the crime, Asunta experienced a series of strange circumstances to which no one gave enough importance. On the one hand, the assault by a masked man in the middle of the night with the sole intention of strangling the little girl after she had left the keys in the ignition; and, on the other, the times that Asunta went to piano and ballet classes sleepy, or she was absent because she was unwell.
The music teacher testified at the trial that Asunta told her that “her mother cheated on her and gave her white powder that made her sleep for days.” And so it was. Since the beginning of July, Alfonso went punctually to the pharmacy to buy boxes of lorazepam, a powerful anxiolytic indicated for anxiety disorder and that causes sleep, and which is known under the name Orfidal. In two months, he accumulated 125 tablets.
On September 21, Rosario and Alfonso killed Asunta. Previously, the three of them ate together at the family house and played cards. The parents took advantage of this meal to give him the lethal dose of Orfidal, a total of 27 pills. Then, they asphyxiated her by suffocation and moved the teenager's body to a forest track in Feros, in Teo, a few kilometers from the Porto family's family home.
That same night, the filicides reported Asunta's disappearance at the National Police station in Santiago de Compostela, but given the inconsistencies, ambiguities and contradictory versions, the agents began to distrust.
Suspicions increased when a few hours later and at dawn, two people found the little girl's body on an embankment. However, something caught the investigators' attention: her body seemed to have been placed gently, as if it had been done by someone who knew her. Those present assured that the girl seemed to be sleeping, if it were not for the place where she was and the remains of a bright orange rope next to her.
The autopsy ruled out sexual assault, one of the first hypotheses, and determined that she was sedated with anxiolytics before dying of asphyxiation due to suffocation. The evidence pointed to her parents.
On September 24, several Civil Guard agents waited for Asunta's cremation wake to end before arresting his mother, and hours later, the same was done with his father. Rosario and Alfonso were charged with murder and Teo's house was searched.
During the visual inspection of the family farm, Rosario appeared calm and relaxed, even talkative and joking with the agents. But, at one point, she tried to reach one of the rooms in the house where she had left evidence, the bathroom on the first floor.
There, in a trash can, a civil guard found a mask, a “slightly moistened mass of paper tissues, and a bright orange rope, similar, practically identical” to the one that lay next to Asunta's body.
This evidence, together with the security camera recordings, which confirmed Rosario's contradictory versions regarding where she and the girl were on the day in question, led the lawyer and her husband Alfonso to provisional detention without bail. However, neither in the police investigation, nor in the investigation nor in the subsequent trial, could the motive for Asunta's murder be found out.
Part of society hoped that, during the court hearing held in October 2015, the couple would break the silence and verbalize why they did it, whose idea it was and who ended up suffocating the little girl. However, when the time came, neither held the other responsible for the events. They simply reaffirmed her innocence.
Rosario Porto claimed up to five times that she had not killed her daughter during her statement, while Alfonso Basterra remained so cold that he even blurted out, “I am innocent and I will leave here [prison] with my head held high.”
The popular jury did not believe a single word, the evidence spoke for itself. Rosario and Alfonso were found guilty of the death of their daughter Asunta and sentenced to 18 years in prison: she as the perpetrator of the crime - Rosario suffocated the teenager - and him, despite the fact that no evidence placed him in the chalet. of Teo, as a necessary cooperator and instigator of a joint plan preconceived months ago.
In the following years, the couple lived their stay in prison in a very different way. Rosario fell into depression, accentuated by lupus, she was admitted to a hospital and her mental health was deteriorating by leaps and bounds. She always proclaimed her innocence and every anniversary of her daughter's death, she published an obituary in a local newspaper that read: “Asunta Yong-Fang. In memoriam. I will Always Love You. Mother".
Rosario maintained this tradition until November 18, 2020, seven years after Asunta's death and seven years after her stay in prison. After two previous suicide attempts, the journalist decided to take her own life by hanging herself with the belt of her robe in her cell in the Brieva prison in Avila. She was 55 years old.
There were hardly any attendees at his burial in the Boisaca cemetery except for a delegation of eight people, among whom was his lawyer José Luis Gutiérrez Aranguren, who saw how the workers placed the coffin in the family pantheon. And next to it, to everyone's surprise, the urn with Asunta's ashes had been deposited. Since then, victim and perpetrator lie in the same place.
For his part, Alfonso Basterra currently remains in the Teixeiro prison (A Coruña), in one of the respect modules under the F.I.E.S classification. (Special Monitoring Inmate File) with special characteristics. This implies that he has greater control of communications and exhaustive surveillance, among other things, being a prisoner convicted of murder.
Likewise, the journalist's career in prison has been irregular. In 2015 he was involved in altercations against officials due to threats, insults and coercion, and last year he was changed modules when he passed an illegal object to a very troublesome Russian prisoner. However, his haughty and complicated attitude has also gone through a period of isolation and anti-suicide protocol, especially after the death of his wife.
This same week, Alfonso maintains that low profile and without sanctions, he appears cooperative and calm and continues to be in charge of the library. It has 35 rewards, a type of benefits granted by the prison disciplinary commission for, among other things, good behavior, participation in directed activities, certain jobs... All of this means that inmates can exchange these rewards for oral communications with family members or friends, for example.
He is scheduled to be released from prison in 2031, although in 2025 he could begin to enjoy his first prison permits upon serving two-thirds of his sentence, thus being eligible for a regime of semi-freedom. When that moment arrives, the question will be whether or not she will fulfill that promise she made in a letter sent to the producers of the documentary Lo que la Verdad hides, in 2017.
“When I regain my freedom, I have the firm intention of disappearing, no one will hear from me again, not even Rosario Porto [here she was still alive]. I have only one reason to stay alive, which is none other than to be a free man again and reunite with my girl, never before. In fact, I have already thought about the how and the where, I just need the when, but everything comes,” the letter said.
