‘The Asunta Case’: the disturbing poem that Rosario Porto’s adopted daughter wrote

Since its release on April 26, ‘The Asunta Case’ has remained one of the most-watched series on Netflix, bringing back into the spotlight the case of the murder of the girl adopted from China by Alfonso Basterra and Rosario Porto, a family from Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain who ended the life of the child when she was only 12 years old.

Asunta murder motive unknown

The crime shocked the country and left many questions unanswered that may never be resolved. Although the investigators quickly suspected the girl’s parents – given their strange behaviour when reporting Asunta’s disappearance and the discovery of remnants of the same ropes used to bind her in the family chalet – the motive for the crime remains unclear.

It is now unlikely that the motive will ever come to light, as Porto, after several attempts, took her own life in 2020, hanging herself with a sheet in the Brieva prison (Ávila). Basterra, who continues to serve an 18-year prison sentence, has remained silent and appears unlikely to speak on the matter.

Nevertheless, new details about the case continue to emerge, some of which were used in the trial but are not included in the Netflix series. One such detail is a poem that Asunta wrote in Galician and dedicated to her mother, which has been shared by the TikTok account Cinespoiler.

“My mother is greedy, but she is not pretty. She is short, but not nice. She sings horribly, cooks with salt. Eats worse, drinks better. Has little flexibility, but is old. Doesn’t know how to talk, but knows how to scold. Knows how to yell, but not to ramble,” Asunta wrote before she was killed, her legal parents administering her with a large amount of the drug Lorazepam.

Two theories about Asunta’s murder motive

Although the motive behind Alfonso Basterra and Rosario Porto’s decision to kill their daughter remains unclear, there are several theories regarding what could have led to the murder of young Asunta.

This week, Mark Guscin, who wrote a book about the case and had the opportunity to interview the lawyer twice while she was in prison, suggested that he believed the murder was due to the fact that the girl knew something significant about her parents, prompting them to eliminate her. He proposed two hypotheses: that the girl knew about her father’s preferences (as images of Asian pornography were found on his personal computer) or that she could have incriminated them as the perpetrators of the death of Rosario Porto’s parents to inherit their substantial wealth.

This latter theory could never be proven because, due to their advanced age, it was believed that they had died of natural causes, and autopsies were not performed.