Heliodoro Sells Alice’s English Properties and Embezzles Her Inheritance

Heliodoro Almenara’s appropriation of Alice Gould’s property unfolded through a sequence of transactions and legal advantages rather than a single act of theft. He sold land in La Mancha with her authorization, received powers that he used to sell two of her English houses, and later took an inheritance that belonged to her while she was confined in the asylum. María Luisa Fernández’s account makes a crucial distinction: Heliodoro did not arrange Alice’s confinement in order to defraud her, but he exploited her illness and confinement to carry out the fraud.

Property Sales and Alice’s Response

A year before María Luisa Fernández disclosed the extent of the scheme, Heliodoro’s dependence on his wife and his gradual appropriation of her possessions were already common knowledge among the family’s friends. The first transaction involved a property in La Mancha, sold with Alice’s authorization. Alice did not see a cent of the proceeds. The authorization, however, gave Heliodoro the means to sell two houses she owned in England. One of those houses was where her father had been born.

Alice’s knowledge of the English sales is left deliberately unsettled. María Luisa Fernández allows several possibilities: Alice did not know, did not want to know, or knew but never spoke about it. That uncertainty matters because it prevents a simple account of her silence as consent. The story instead presents a striking contrast between the legal power Heliodoro exercised over her property and Alice’s apparent failure to respond to the violations around her.

Her limited actions were to separate their bank accounts and their bedrooms; she took no further measures. Even the separation of sleeping quarters did not protect her domestic space. Heliodoro refused to use the room alone and turned it into a brothel, holding bacchanalian gatherings close to the room where Alice slept. Servants described her indifference to these insults as abnormal. María Luisa Fernández rejected explanations based on pride, coldness, or ordinary indifference, describing Alice’s changed temperament as seeming instead like ignorance of what was happening around her. The account does not resolve whether Alice was unaware or unable to confront what she knew.

The Inheritance and the Asylum

The earlier property dealings became part of a larger fraud when Alice was confined. At a meeting of the hospital’s doctors, María Luisa Fernández reported that she had been commissioned by Alice to investigate the many unclear circumstances surrounding her case. Her investigation uncovered that Heliodoro had forged his wife’s signature and, taking advantage of her confinement, appropriated an inheritance that belonged solely to her. Heliodoro had since fled Spain.

The inheritance was from Harold Gould. María Luisa Fernández explained that if Heliodoro’s earlier forgery—the use of Alice’s authorization to sell the English houses—had come to light, a court would have appointed a judicial guardian to administer Alice’s property. Under that arrangement, Heliodoro could not have seized the inheritance as he intended. The earlier sales therefore mattered not only as losses in themselves: the exposure of Heliodoro’s conduct could have blocked the later appropriation.

Method and Motive

The account distinguishes Heliodoro’s reason for getting Alice admitted from the opportunity he gained once she was inside the hospital. María Luisa Fernández rejected the claim that he had confined his wife in order to defraud her. Rather, he defrauded her by exploiting the circumstances of her illness and confinement. On her explanation, the simpler route was to use the admission application and E. Donadío’s provisional diagnosis, rather than risk bringing the earlier forgery before a court and triggering the appointment of a judicial guardian.

That distinction gives the scheme its particular shape. Alice’s confinement was not presented as the original instrument of a property plot; it became a condition Heliodoro could use to obtain control of the inheritance. The account links intimate betrayal to administrative procedure: forged authority enabled the earlier sales, while the provisional diagnosis and admission process helped leave Alice vulnerable when the inheritance became available.

Disclosure and Significance

The revelations transform the meaning of Alice’s apparent passivity. The separated accounts and bedrooms had marked a partial withdrawal from the marriage, but they did not stop Heliodoro’s dispossession of her or his abuse of their shared home. Nor does the account settle how much Alice understood while the sales were taking place. What it establishes is that the financial consequences extended from the English houses to Harold Gould’s inheritance, and that her confinement gave Heliodoro an opportunity to exploit her position.

María Luisa Fernández’s testimony also separates suspicion from the specific mechanism of the fraud. It identifies the forged signature, the prior use of Alice’s powers of sale, the risk that a judicial guardian would have prevented the inheritance seizure, and the role of the admission procedure and provisional diagnosis. The resulting picture is not simply that a husband took his wife’s property, but that earlier financial deception and later institutional vulnerability formed connected stages of her dispossession.