Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
The Padrón Guesthouse in Santa Cruz de Tenerife is a guesthouse where two people lost their lives in a gruesome manner. The scene of the crime was Room 306, which was occupied by José Antonio Luis Aguiar, better known as EL Jala. On 25 August 2010, whilst tidying up in Room 302 – which served as a sort of storeroom and was not accessible to the public – the children of the owners of the Padrón Guesthouse discovered human bones between two mattresses on a rickety bed, on top of which were piled suitcases, scattered clothing and a chair. They immediately alerted the Guardia Civil. The officers had to tape the mattresses together to prevent the skeletal remains from falling out. The post-mortem revealed that the man must have been dead for over eight months. He had been brutally murdered, having been bound, gagged and tortured for days before finally being killed with a sharp object. But who was the male corpse? This question was answered by the serial numbers on two metal plates on his leg and shoulder. The man had undergone surgery at Castellón Hospital. The alphanumeric code on the implants identified the body as Ángel Bermejo Beltrán, who was born on 3 November 1955 in Zaragoza. Ángel had studied music before joining the army. He had been a member of the Army Academy Music Band in his home town. Ángel was married and had a son. He had lived in Madrid and Valencia before moving to Tenerife, where he lost contact with his family due to his drug and alcohol addiction. Until his death, the retired military musician was a regular at the soup kitchen run by the municipal animal shelter. For a long time, nobody noticed his disappearance. Suspicion quickly fell on José Antonio, who lived in the same guesthouse and was a friend of Ángel’s. José Antonio was addicted to methadone and needed money. He knew that Ángel received a monthly pension of just under 1,000 euros. To get his hands on it, he held Ángel captive in his room and extorted the pension from him by beating him until he handed it over. Ángel subsequently sought treatment at hospital, but nobody believed his story. Not even at the animal shelter or in the guesthouse did anyone pay any heed to his claims. After José Antonio had murdered his acquaintance, he disposed of the body in room 302. Although drug addicts were sleeping there despite the ban, nobody noticed the smell of decomposition for months. On 26 January 2013, José Antonio was sentenced to 17.5 years’ imprisonment for the murder of Ángel Bermejo Beltrán. Then, in August 2016, the dismembered body of a woman was found in two military rucksacks in the Santos Gorge by a woman out walking her dogs. Heavy rainfall and a fire had exposed the rucksacks. The task now was to establish the identity of the woman’s body, which carried no documents or clues as to who she was. The gorge was only 400 metres from the Padrón guesthouse, which is why the Guardia Civil questioned its residents. This revealed that a woman named Adoración de la Cruz had been missing for six years. She had been on friendly terms with José Antonio, whom she had met in prison at the time. Like José Antonio, Adoración was also a drug addict. She had been living with him in room 306 at the Padrón Guesthouse until she disappeared without a trace one day. She was last seen alive in 2009 with José Antonio. Her identity was confirmed by DNA extracted from the bones, which was compared with that of Adoración’s daughter. Adoración died after yet another violent argument with José Antonio. The Guardia Civil were certain that José Antonio, who was in prison, was also responsible for Adoración’s death; she had been brutally murdered. Ultimately, a drop of blood found in Room 306 during the investigation into Ángel’s murder incriminated José Antonio as the murderer, as it clearly belonged to Adoración. In 2022, José Antonio was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for the murder of Adoración de la Cruz and ordered to pay 200,000 euros in compensation to the victim’s relatives. However, José Antonio died of cancer in March 2024 at Salamanca Hospital.
