Who is Sophie Elizabeth Paton, the English teacher in the Asunta Case who doesn’t appear in the Netflix series?

Released on Netflix last month, the six-part series The Asunta Case chronicles the real-life murder of 12-year-old girl Asunta Basterra - one of the most infamous crimes in recent Spanish history.

What happened to Asunta Basterra?

Alfonso Basterra and Rosario Porto, a well-off couple who had adopted the Chinese-born Asunta as an infant, were convicted of murdering their daughter, whose dead body was found by the side of a country road in September 2013. Basterra and Porto - who divorced months before Asunta’s death - both received 18-year sentences in 2015.

Asunta is believed to have been drugged using the anti-anxiety medication Lorazepam, then suffocated. It seems, however, that only her parents could tell us exactly what happened when their daughter died in Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain. But they’re unlikely to. Porto committed suicide by hanging herself in her prison cell in 2020, and Basterra - who is incarcerated at the Teixeiro prison, near the Galician city A Coruña - remains stubbornly tight-lipped.

There is, though, one person who could perhaps shed some further light on the case - at least on the final months of Asunta’s life. That person is the British woman Sophie Elizabeth Paton. Asunta is said to have spent a lot of time in her company, but Paton doesn’t appear in the Netflix series.

Who is Sophie Elizabeth Paton?

Paton was hired to teach English to Asunta, a highly-gifted girl who stood out both academically and for her musical abilities, as well as showing sporting aptitude. Following Asunta’s death, journalists managed to track Paton down back in her native country, but she has always refused to speak to the media.

It was Paton who is thought to have helped Asunta to create ‘Asunca’, an English-language blog about mysterious occurrences in three parks in Santiago de Compostela, the Galician city where Asunta lived with her parents.

The website’s introduction reads: “This is a peculiar blog abaut [sic] the haunted history of the parks of Santiago de Compostela: The Alameda, Belvís, Bonaval. The people wo [sic] will tell te [sic] story of these parks will be Asunta Basterra Porto and Sophie Elizabeth Paton. We are writing thi [sic] blog because other people have told us that they have seen strangers in the parks. We are ghost hunters and are investigating these strange sightings.”

Did Asunta and Paton actually write the blog?

On top of her intellectual gifts, Asunta is described as being a girl with a highly curious nature. In spite of her young age, it therefore surprised no one that she could be behind the blog. What’s more, the Alameda park was known to be a place she often went with her maternal grandfather, Francisco Porto. However, very few people - probably only Basterra or Paton - would be able to confirm whether the blog really belonged to Asunta.

And given the interest that the case sparked both nationally and internationally, the possibility cannot be ruled out that an internet user sought to pose as the girl.

The blog’s posts appear to have been published between July and September 2012 - a year before Asunta’s death - but these dates could have been manually modified to fit the timeline surrounding her murder. Moreover, the photographs used on the blog would have been easy for an impersonator to find; in the wake of Asunta’s killing, they became widely available online.

The Asunta Case: how to watch

Released on Netflix on 26 April 2024, The Asunta Case is a Spanish-language dramatisation that stars Candela Peña as Rosario Porto, Tristán Ulloa as Alfonso Basterra, and Iris Whu as Asunta Basterra.

How much does Netflix cost?

You can sign up to the streaming service’s ad-free standard plan for $15.49 a month, and to its ad-free premium plan for $22.99 a month. A standard plan with ads is also available, for $6.99 a month.