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Indeterminate Televisual Crimes of Passion
Spaniard suspected of slaying woman he proposed to on TV talk show
Wed Nov 21, 11:00 AM
By Daniel Woolls, The Associated Press
MADRID, Spain - A Spaniard who went on television to beg his estranged girlfriend to marry him - getting down on his knees, crying and offering an engagement ring, only to be rejected - is now a suspect in her stabbing death, officials said Wednesday.
Ricardo Navarro, 30, and his former partner, a Russian woman identified only as Svetlana, took part in a popular daytime talk show last week.
"I love you. You only live once, as you told me, and I want to spend mine with you," Navarro said on a program called Diario de Patricia on the network Antena 3.
"I want you to marry me. You are everything to me. Everything," Navarro said, his voice quavering.
The woman, also 30, was found with her throat cut four days later in the elevator of her apartment building in the eastern city of Alicante, and died on Monday. Her last name has not been released because it is court policy not to name victims of gender violence, said an official at the Superior Court of Justice of Valencia, which covers neighbouring Alicante.
Police arrested Navarro. He went before a judge Wednesday for a preliminary hearing. He has not been formally charged.
Antena 3 did not return a call seeking comment Wednesday.
Boomerang, the company that produces the program for Antena 3, said the televised meeting was arranged as a surprise - at Navarro's request - so he could try to make up with his girlfriend.
Program staffers, acting on their own, have tried to contact the woman's relatives in Russia. But Baldomero Limon, director of programming, said Boomerang sees no link between the show and her death and does not feel in any way responsible.
"There is no cause and effect relationship," Limon said, noting the killing was four days after the show.
The host of the program, Patricia Gaztanaga, began Tuesday's show by expressing sorrow for the victim and her family. The Russian woman leaves behind a small daughter from another relationship.
"None of us who take part in this program could imagine that something like this was going to happen," Gaztanaga said.
The "Jenny Jones Show" was involved in a somewhat similar incident in the 1990s in the United States.
In 1996, a U.S. jury convicted show guest Jonathan T. Schmitz of second-degree murder for shooting a man who had declared a homosexual attraction to him on television.
