Aurea Vazquez Rijos married two times while on the run and had three kids
The selection of a jury for a fugitive Puerto Rican beauty queen who dashed across Europe to evade arrest for contract-killing of her multi-millionaire Canadian husband began last week.
The beauty queen in question is Aurea Vazquez Rijos from Puerto Rico who won the Miss Puerto Rico Petite contest. After five years of hide and seek with law enforcement agencies including the FBI she is back in the native country facing a trial for conspiring to murder her husband, Adam Joel Anhang in 2005. Adam’s father Abe who is a Winnipeg lawyer, said after her arrest “ Whoever did this, did they ever think I wouldn’t come after them?”
On a balmy midnight in September 2005, San Juan police found the body of 32-year-old Adam crumpled on a cobblestone street in the heart of the capital’s tourist district. His wife had been injured too, and rushed to the hospital. Adam, a multi-millionaire entrepreneur originally from Canada was one of 766 homicides in Puerto Rico that year. This tiny island has a murder rate three times that of New York City and people thought the murder would get lost in a sea of other investigations. But victim’s father had other ideas.
Adam was duped into believing that he was meeting his wife in a restaurant that evening to discuss the terms of their impending divorce and it was known to Aurea that the legal separation would deprive her of access to much of her husband’s estate, estimated to be worth $24 million. According to the nuptial agreement she was to get only $360,000 if they divorced but as a widow she could have claimed a larger share of his wealth.
In college, Adam majored in finance, and then became a top graduate student at the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He launched several successful businesses, including an internet gambling site, which helped make him a multi-millionaire. When Adam was introduced to Puerto Rico by a business colleague, he was swept away by the island beauty and its real estate potential.
In 2003 Adam met 23-year-old Aurea Vasquez in a pub for the first time and fell in love with her. Adam had a college sweetheart but just two weeks after the marriage the couple divorced. A friend said that despite Adam’s meteoric rise in business the whiz kid was short-sighted when it came to romance. Adam’s marriage to Aurea was kept a secret from his family and they came to know about their hurried marriage only after Adam’s death.
In March 2004 Adam moved to a big house with Aurea and bought her a small restaurant in San Juan called Pink Skirt. In March 2005, they married in a small civil ceremony. On the day of the murder a restaurant’s security camera captured the couple entering it. Two witnesses including a lawyer, courageously came forward though many witnesses in Puerto Rico are reluctant to do so for fear of getting into bad books of the mafia gangs. The lawyer said that he was 10 feet away when Adam was killed. Aurea got hit in the head too, though she never lost consciousness. Adam was pronounced dead on the scene
He described the killer as heavyset, between 5’8″ and 5’10”, sporting a mustache and small beard, and a ponytail. Later a man named Jonathan Román Riverawho fitted the description was arrested and was convicted of the murder. The man who worked as a dishwasherin Aurea’s restaurant was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 105 years in prison.
That conviction was later overturned as in 2008, a federal grand jury indicted Aurea on two murder-for-hire related counts after a man suspected of being the street assailant confessed to the killing. The arrested man Alex “El Loco” Pabón Colón who ran into a nearby slums after the killing said that Aurea agreed to pay him $3 million for killing her husband.
In 2008, a federal grand jury indicted Aurea but she fled Puerto Rico and settled in Italy where laws have sometimes been used by fugitives to make their extradition difficult. The former beauty queen travelled to Spain, Israel, France, Gibraltar and England assuming several identities, dying her hair in different colours regularly. She met a Florence air condition contractor and had twin daughters together but finally she was divorced when he came to know that she was being wanted in Puerto Rico.
Abe and the FBI were powerless against Italian authorities, who have a long history of non-cooperation with U.S. law enforcement but Adam’s father did not lie low all this while. He hired a private detective only known as Faroukh in Italy to shadow Aurea on a $1000 a day fee. Father’s relentless hunt to bring his son’s killers to book bore fruit when the FBI and Spanish authorities set up a sting operation, inviting Aurea to Madrid to work as a guide to a fictitious tour group. She took the bait arranged by one of her most trusted friends. Otherwise shy may not have fallen into the trap.
On June 3, 2013 the FBI announced fugitive’s arrest as a result of a joint effort between the FBI Legal Attachés, United States Attorney’s Office District of Puerto Rico, Spanish National Police, Interpol, and the Department of Justice Office of International Affairs.
When Aurea was jailed in Spain pending her extradition she had an affair with a petty criminal jailed on drug offences and had a baby. She was allowed to marry the man in jail, asking a Madrid judge not to extradite her as the mother of a Spanish citizen.
Her desperate attempts to stay in Spain failed and finally she was in a private FBI jet in 2015. Her month-old baby was sent into the care of her family after she landed in Puerto Rico. Further legal delays and then Hurricane Maria led to several postponements of the trial, in which Aurea’s brother, sister and the latter’s partner will also face charges in the US federal court in San Juan.
Her extradition from Spain was possible only after the prosecutors gave a sworn affidavit to Spanish authorities that they will not ask for the death sentence if she is convicted. Adam’s father is optimistic that justice will finally be done for his son though he finds it ironic that the woman who is complicit in the death might get away with a lighter sentence as Spain placed conditions on her transfer back to the United States to face justice.
Spanish authorities released Aurea into U.S. custody only after they had assurances that the woman would not face the death penalty or life imprisonment without parole. – newstrails.com
