A woman accused of poisoning her lover’s daughter with deadly chocolate-covered raspberries has been arrested in London, but she has dismissed the allegations against her as ‘gossip’.
Two teenage girls are dead and an international manhunt for the alleged killer has finally ended in London.
Entrepreneur Zulma Guzman Castro, 54, who is accused of poisoning the girls with deadly raspberries, was involved in a tumultuous and steamy affair with the father of one of the victims.
But despite the put-together performance she hosted on Shark Tank – a show similar to Dragon’s Den, where she pitched for funding for her company – those who worked closely with her claim that behind closed doors she was anything but. One of her employees has even claimed that when her lover, Juan de Bedout – who Castro admitted to tracking with a GPS device – showed up in her makeshift office in her home, she would unceremoniously exploit her employees so she could spend an afternoon romping with him.
The accused killer has flatly denied all charges against her, dismissing them as mere “gossip” among friends, but the case has attracted attention and news around the world. Now that they have been arrested in London after a dramatic standoff last month that saw Castro throw himself from Battersea Bridge into the icy waters of the River Thames, the victims’ families could finally be ready to get answers.
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It was a normal spring afternoon for Ines de Bedout, 14, and Emilia Forero, 13, who returned from school and decided to bake cookies at the lavish apartment in Bogota, Colombia, where Bedout lived with her family. As they got to work, a tempting delivery arrived by courier: raspberries covered in chocolate, a snack Ines was known to love.
Castro would also have been well aware of the young people’s daily routines and movements as a supposed long-term family friend, in addition to the fact that, as one of their favorites, it was unlikely that teenagers would be able to resist the treat. The courier later claimed to investigators that it had been a friend of Castro’s who had delivered the delivery to him. In a tragic twist of fate, the two teenagers are said to have rejected the first attempt to deliver the poisoned package simply because they did not expect anything to arrive.
At 7pm they finally accepted delivery, but within less than a week they were both dead. Two other youths were said to have eaten the raspberries, which were reportedly injected with thallium, a colorless, odorless heavy metal that is incredibly poisonous even in very small amounts. Fortunately, these two survived, but one has permanent injuries from the poisoning.
It is being called an ‘act of revenge’ by the alleged killer, who is said to have had a falling out with Ines’ father, Juan, with whom she had an affair five years earlier. Castro claims the romance ended a year before Juan’s wife’s death, but in a shocking twist, authorities are now re-investigating the 2021 death of Alicia Graham Sardi as a possible thallium poisoning.
“I am in the middle of a very serious situation,” Castro wrote in a message to friends, according to the Telegraph, “in which I am accused of being the person who sent a poison that killed two girls. I imagine the gossip is growing like wildfire.
‘They accuse me of having fled to Argentina, and then to Brazil, Spain and Great Britain. Those who know me know that I haven’t run away anywhere. They know that I worked in Argentina and started a master’s degree in journalism here.
“I imagine they accuse me of having a secret relationship with the father of one of the girls,” she admitted.
The founder of car-sharing company Car-B, which saw her participate in reality TV in search of funding, her former employees have restarted a long-defunct group chat, the Telegraph reports this after an international manhunt for Castro was launched in October, when Interpol issued a red warrant for her arrest. Some employees have even speculated whether they “had a lucky escape” after her company collapsed due to debt in 2019.
“There was no office, it was just her living room,” former Chief Technical Officer Dalel, 31, told the newspaper. “She was very difficult with money… and she liked to yell at people.”
Dalel also revealed that the father of one of the deceased girls regularly showed up at Castro’s house in the middle of the workday: “We started to realize it when she asked for her space to have sex – she called us and told us to leave her house in ten minutes.”
In December, Castro took part in an interview that was released the day before she was found in Britain. She denounced the accusations against her, saying: “I am a mother, and that must be unbearable pain. I understand that for that reason they want to find the perpetrator and use all possible means to do so, but I am not that perpetrator. The strategy is clearly to destroy me completely before any legal proceedings… without any guarantee of a fair trial at this point.”
However, she admitted to the affair with Juan, revealing that the romance had been seriously stormy: “When I was in a relationship with Juan, out of jealousy and because I was caught up in all the lies, he challenged me… saying that I was not able to know where he was hiding,” she told the Colombian outlet.
“I told him I was capable of doing that, and then I started looking for a way to put the GPS in the car.” It was this interview that provided a major clue to her whereabouts, as she was seen drinking from a Buxton water bottle, a brand only available in Britain.
Pedro Forero, the father of the late Emilia, wrote in a heartbreaking post on social media about what would have been his daughter’s birthday: “Fourteen years ago, a life full of hopes, joys and dreams began… As a father, it is incomprehensible to think that someone was able to take this away.
“Not only has she taken away my dreams, my desires and my prospects in life as a father… She has robbed my daughter of the opportunity to be a friend, a professional, a wife, a mother and a daughter.”
It was on December 16 that British authorities finally caught up with Castro, after being alerted that there was a “woman in distress” at Battersea Bridge. “Police were called at 6.45am on Tuesday, December 16, to reports of a woman in distress on Battersea Bridge. The Marine Policing Unit recovered a woman in her 50s from the water at 7.14am and she was taken to hospital where her injuries were assessed as not life-threatening or life-changing,” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement at the time. The 54-year-old accused killer was subsequently detained under the Mental Health Act.
Castro has now been arrested for the alleged crimes and will be extradited from Britain to Colombia, where the poisonings took place. Given the enormous interest in the case, authorities have been forced to urge the public to remember that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
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