Heliodoro Almenara’s embezzlement of Alice Gould’s property turns the apparent domestic breakdown of their marriage into a deliberate financial scheme. The disclosures made by María Luisa Fernández connect the sale of family property, the appropriation of Alice’s inheritance, and her confinement in the asylum: private trust gave Heliodoro access to assets, while institutional custody helped him keep Alice from protecting them.

The property sales

María Luisa traced the trouble to the year before her account. Among the couple’s friends, it was widely known that Heliodoro lived at Alice’s expense and was gradually taking possession of what she owned. One transaction began with Alice’s authorization: Heliodoro sold a property she had in La Mancha. Alice never received a cent from that sale.

The authorization did not remain confined to the land transaction. Heliodoro used the powers granted for that sale to dispose of two houses Alice owned in England. One was the house in which her father had been born. The gap between the limited authority Alice had given and the properties Heliodoro sold makes the method concrete: the apparent legitimacy of one transaction supplied cover for a much larger appropriation.

A marriage marked by apparent indifference

Alice’s response, as María Luisa described it, was not to pursue a remedy. She separated the couple’s bank accounts and bedrooms, but took no further action. Heliodoro then failed even to occupy the bedroom alone: he turned it into a place for bacchanalian parties, held only a short distance from the room where Alice slept.

The servants’ account made Alice’s passivity seem more disturbing than ordinary coldness. They described her indifference to the humiliations as abnormal, but María Luisa rejected pride, reserve, and deliberate unconcern as explanations. Alice seemed instead not to know what was happening around her. That distinction gives the financial abuse its personal and practical force: the assets were being taken while the person most directly affected appeared unable, or unwilling, to register the surrounding violations.

Confinement and the inheritance

At the doctors’ meeting, María Luisa identified a further step in the scheme. Heliodoro had forged Alice’s signature and, taking advantage of her confinement in the hospital, appropriated an inheritance that belonged only to her. The revelation reframed the asylum admission as more than a medical decision: while Alice was detained, her husband could act against her property with reduced risk of interruption from her.

The testimony also explained why Heliodoro chose this course rather than bringing the accusations against Alice before a judge. Asked why he had not prosecuted her after three attempted poisonings, María Luisa argued that a court would have discovered his earlier forgery concerning her English properties. In that situation, Alice would have been assigned a judicial guardian, rather than Heliodoro gaining control of her assets. Such scrutiny would have blocked his real objective: taking the inheritance from Harold Gould that was due to Alice.

The scheme exposed

María Luisa described the asylum route as the simpler procedure: an application for Alice’s admission, accompanied by E. Donadío’s provisional diagnosis. At the meeting, she also identified Heliodoro as having fled Spain after taking the inheritance. The sequence links financial fraud to the institutions meant to adjudicate and care for Alice: the earlier misuse of a sale authorization and the later forgery were exposed only when her case was reconsidered by the hospital’s doctors.

The disclosure altered the meaning of the couple’s domestic arrangements and of Alice’s apparent inaction. The separated accounts and bedrooms had not stopped the taking of her property; nor had her admission merely placed her under medical observation. In María Luisa’s account, Heliodoro’s exploitation depended on both access and absence: access acquired through Alice’s authorization and forged signature, and absence secured while she was confined. The theft therefore stands at the intersection of marital betrayal and institutional vulnerability, making the question of Alice’s health inseparable from the question of who had profited from her detention.