Stepmother appears in court charged with child killing in Valpaços

A 48-year-old woman, identified this far only as ‘Eulália’, is appearing in court in Vila Pouca de Aguiar today charged with murder of her eight-year-old step-child Lara, whom, she has apparently told police, she didn’t want to harm – but it was a way of getting back at her husband.

Lara thus paid the price. Her body was discovered in the early hours of yesterday in the Serra de Padrela, close to her home near Valpaços, after hours of police interrogation led Eulália to reveal the spot where she had left it.

This horrible story is just one of a number reported in recent years – most of them caused by either ‘step-parents’ or sometimes even parents themselves. One of these desperate murders, where the victim was also named Lara, involved the child being stabbed 13 times by her own grandfather (March 2023) because – as he told police – he ‘didn’t want to lose custody of her’.

The brutality existing in families and extended families is so shocking that these terrible incidents are often ‘reported on the day they happen’ and then disappear into ‘back pages’, or even fudge boxes.

We will hear later today that Eulália has been remanded in custody pending trial, and then it will be months before we hear of her again. She is accused of qualified murder and the desecration of a corpse, and faces a maximum jail term of 25 years.

The alleged details of how the step-mother planned her crime demonstrate that this murder was premeditated, but clearly without any thought to how to deflect attention from ‘the logical suspect’, which as Correio da Manhã has explained, could only ever have been Eulália.

The relationship between Eulália and Lara’s father has been described as turbulent: Eulália has a son, aged 12, who is institutionalised due to his aggressive behaviour, and Lara had been flagged by “technical elements at the school” she attended as a child with behavioural and social problems who showed “some signs of negligence”.

In many ways, this is another case (we are only months away from the death of British child, Alfie Hallett at the hands of his mother’s ‘ex’) that highlights the fact that neighbours/ communities do need to intervene when they are aware that the lives of children are far from ideal – in order to prevent tragedies, and save multiple lives from being broken.

Source: Correio da Manhã

Natasha Donn

Journalist for the Portugal Resident.