The investigation into the murder of a 50-year-old sports fanatic has started to throw up all sorts of inconsistencies – not least the fact that reports suggest no one outside the man’s immediate circle seems to have seen, spoken or heard from him in the hours leading up to his disappearance.
The body of Luís Grilo was finally laid to rest yesterday – over six weeks since he went missing after a day in which police have now established he did not go to work nor answer his telephone.
Everything Luís Grilo did in the hours leading up to his reported disappearance “went against his habitual routine, and has been classified as strange ”, writes Correio da Manhã today.
The 50-year-old IT engineer disappeared during a cycle ride in Vila Franca de Xira on July 16.
His badly decomposed naked body was discovered last week, over 130 kms away (click here).
But what has transpired since Grilo’s body was formally identified is what is troubling investigators.
A work colleague has told CM for example that it was “very strange” that Grilo did not answer “or even return calls” on the Monday that he went missing.
That afternoon his wife Rosa has said her husband left home for a cycle ride at 4.30pm. But his trainer has since classified this as “strange” too as Grilo should not have been in training that day.
Up until this week, CM suggests that police had been working on the fact that Grilo was caught on CCTV riding his bicycle near Cachoeiras shortly before he was due home. But now, says the paper, there is the suspicion that the image caught on CCTV may not have been Grilo at all.
“The autopsy hasn’t helped”, say reporters, as the body was discovered in such an advanced stage of decomposition that identity had to be established through the analysis of fingerprints.
All that does seem clear, the paper concludes, is that this mystery surrounds someone who both knew Grilo’s routines well as well as the spot where his body was eventually discovered (on August 20).
The theory that this may have been a crime of passion is “gaining traction”, says the paper. But the “nucleus closest to the victim” is keeping its silence, and writers led by journalist Tânia Laranjo suggest this was a murder that was “planned in great detail”.
