He had blood on his hands... son tells how expat dad killed mum
A TEENAGER trying to save his dying mother saw his father holding a knife and with blood on his hands, a court heard yesterday.
Alonso Tornay was using paper to cover his mother Gloria’s stab wounds when Geoffrey Elton turned up, the hearing in Malaga, Spain, was told.
British computer programmer Elton has admitted killing his headteacher wife but claims he had a mental illness during the March 2019 attack.
Alonso, aged 15 at the time, told the murder trial that he was woken by the sound of a blow after a “normal” evening meal with his parents. He followed a trail of blood and found his mother on her bed in the family’s £560,000 villa in Estepona.
He said: “She was on her knees...
leaning on one hand with the other over her face.”
Alonso told prosecutor Julio Angel Martinez Carazo: “She was covered in blood and I asked her what had happened. She didn’t reply so I went to the kitchen to get some paper.
“I saw my dad arrive with a knife and blood on his hands. He said she had had an accident and then asked me for a hug. I told him to call an ambulance and that’s when he threw the landline and two mobiles including my mum’s phone into the garden.
“I ran out of the house through the open front door to find them and call police, and I heard the door slammed shut behind me and locked.”
As his father looked on, Alonso, now 18, picked out one of two knives that prosecutors say Elton used to stab mother-of-two Gloria up to 16 times.
He was shown a black-handled kitchen knife that he said he found covered in blood in an outside storage room when he went to fetch tools to try to force his way back inside.
“That’s the one”, Alonso said as it was taken out of a wrapper by a court official before being seen close up by defence and prosecution lawyers.
Alonso said he smashed glass in a barred kitchen window, then his dad shouted “That’s enough”, before offering him a drink of water.
He told jurors: “I heard my mum yell ‘Don’t hurt the boy’ from the bedroom. I heard her shout like she’d never shouted before. I was yelling for help over and over and a neighbour heard me and called the police.
“It must have taken them a good 30 minutes to force open the front door because it was a reinforced door. I saw my dad come out in handcuffs.”
Elton, 57, faces up to 14 years in jail if he is convicted of murdering Gloria, 58. His lawyer has said he should instead be treated in a secure psychiatric centre then expelled from Spain and handed over to UK authorities.
The jury is expected to retire to consider its verdict tomorrow.