A man murdered his wife at her sister’s funeral service – after he killed both her sister and father to lure her there.Samuel Velasco Gurrola faces life in prison after he executed the grisly plot with the help of his two siblings in the US town of El Paso in Texas.
Mr Velasco, 41, wanted to kill his wife Ruth Sagredo so she couldn’t testify against him in a sexual assault case, according to CBS News.He hired a hitman in 2008 to murder Ms Sagredo’s father in Juarez, the city in Mexico which shares a border with El Paso, in an attempt to lure her to the funeral.But that didn’t work and a month later Mr Velasco’s sister-in-law was also found dead in the Mexican city. Ms Sagredo was killed at her sister’s funeral procession.The jury took just three hours to convict Mr Velasco of seven separate accounts in what prosecutors called an “evil plot”.
He is set to be sentenced in January. Mr Valasco’s lawyer told CBS News he would appeal the decision.“They deliberated for a long time but they did reach a decision based more on the emotional aspect, tugging on the heartstrings, than looking at necessarily some of the contradictory facts,” he said.According to Vice News, Mr Velasco, his brother Emmanuel and sister Dalia were allegedly at the head of a drug trafficking gang which prosecutors referred to as the “Velasco Criminal Enterprise”.It is alleged that the siblings planned and executed a wave of “extortion and kidnapping” in the US and Mexico from 2009 to 2013, according to the website.
The adjacent cities of El Paso and Juarez are divided by the Rio Grande river, which is the border between the two countries.