On May 26, 2019, Manuel Germán Ramírez Valdovinos will have been in prison for 19 years, serving a sentence of 43 years for the murder of a man who is allegedly alive and well.
Valdovinos used to work as a music teacher at a school in the town of Texapan, in the State of Mexico. On May 26, 2000, he had just come back from work and was celebrating his son's one-month anniversary with his wife, when
a commando of eight judicial policemen stormed into his home, beat him, handcuffed him and put him into the back of a car with no license plates.
He was arrested without a warrant and taken to the local police station where he was hung up by his hands with metal chains, tortured with electric shocks and accused of the murder of a person he barely knew. Manuel was only 22-years-old at the time.
Upon hearing the police officers' accusation, Manuel was shocked. He knew the alleged victim, Manuel Martínez Elizalde, as he had helped him out with money before, because his family "had nothing to eat". But he had never had any arguments with him, let alone any reason to kill him. Things got even stranger when he saw Elizalde's father at the station, and then heard him tell the policemen "no, not this one, he's my friend's son and he's going to cause trouble for me". The officer in charge replied "look, you asked for three bastards and here they are. Now everything is arranged with the Public Prosecutor's Office".
Manuel claims that Elizalde's father promised the agents who arrested him a reward of $150,000 for their participation in what turned out to be an unbelievably cruel scheme. He would later learn that Manuel Martínez Elizalde's family claimed a $1 million life insurance policy after his alleged death. But the supposed murder victim never actually died. In fact, both Valdovinos and his wife Esther claim that it is a known fact that Elizalde moved to the United States where he used plastic surgery to alter his physical appearance. He has been living there ever since, under a different name, but regularly visits his father at the villa he built with the life insurance money.
Comment: Whoa. Just five days prior, this happened:
Pilot dies, family avoids disaster as plane crashes into home in Florida