On March 26, 2021, lawyer Tânia Reis and the forensic advisor with whom she works, João de Sousa, consulted the file of an accusation that the Public Ministry (MP) addressed to them. If, the previous day, Tânia Reis had been at the Supreme Court of Justice (STJ) defending the grounds of an appeal she had presented on behalf of her constituent Rosa Grilo, invoking failures in the assessment of the evidence and asking for the nullity of the decisions of the 1 .ª Instance and the Lisbon Court of Appeal, when she consulted the prosecution records that the MP attributed to her, the lawyer resigned from defending the client. It was reported at the time that Tânia Reis felt cheated by Rosa Grilo. The STJ maintained the maximum sentence, 25 years in prison, to which Rosa Grilo had been sentenced (as well as her lover, António Joaquim) for the murder of her husband, computer engineer and triathlete Luís Grilo, which took place in July 2018, in the couple’s bedroom, who lived in Cachoeiras, Vila Franca de Xira.
Now, lawyer Tânia Reis and forensic advisor João de Sousa are defendants, charged with the crime of personal favoring in the defense of Rosa Grilo, and whose trial begins on the 6th, at the Vila Franca de Xira Court. The Penal Code defines that crime as follows: “Whoever, in whole or in part, prevents, frustrates or eludes the probation or preventive activity of a competent authority, with the intention or with the conscience of preventing another person, who has committed a crime, from being subjected to a penalty or measure. security, is punished with imprisonment for up to three years or with a fine.”
The prosecution says that Tânia Reis and João de Sousa “created and/or caused a hole in the bathtub of the suite in the couple’s bedroom (…), and placed (…) two fragments of a firearm projectile under it”
The decision to pronounce Tânia Reis e João de Sousa was taken, on October 26, 2021, by Dora Dinis, investigating judge at the Loures Court, who considered the conviction of the defendants in trial for the aforementioned crime more likely than their acquittal. . In her order, to which VISÃO had access, the magistrate gives as credible the thesis of the prosecution, according to which between December 6, 2019 and February 14, 2020, Tânia Reis and João de Sousa “planted evidence” in the Cachoeiras housing, to organize a new “crime scene”, with the aim of prolonging the trial and changing “the perception of the facts under analysis, thus allowing the maximum period of preventive detention and the consequent release of the prisoner to be released. client of the defendants, Rosa Grilo, as well as her subsequent acquittal”.
According to the MP, “in a way that has not been concretely determined”, Tânia Reis and João de Sousa took “possession of two already detonated casings of 7.65 mm caliber (…) and two fragments of a firearm projectile”. A later investigation found that those two casings had resulted from shots from the pistol that has been seized, since September 2018, in the case file that sentenced Rosa Grilo and António Joaquim, who belonged to the latter and which was given as the one from which the shot came. who killed Luís Grilo (holder of life insurance worth around half a million euros).
Exhumation of Luís Grilo
The prosecution says that the wrappings were placed in a dresser drawer and in a jewelry box, both in the couple’s bedroom. And that Tânia Reis and João de Sousa, again “in a non-concretely established way, created and/or caused a hole in the bathtub of the suite in the couple’s bedroom (…), and placed the two fragments of a firearm projectile underneath of the same”. The location of Luís Grilo’s murder thus passed from the bedroom, as was being judged since September 10, 2019, to the bathroom, raising the suspicion that the murder was committed by third parties. Remember that Rosa Grilo insisted that her husband had died at the hands of three men (two Angolans and a “white man”) who invaded her house in search of diamonds. Before, in July 2018, he had only alerted to the disappearance of Luís Grilo, after he had “gone out for training”, and the triathlete’s body was found on August 24, in an advanced state of decomposition, without clothes, with a bag on the head and 130 kilometers from the couple’s residence.
In a recorded phone call, Rosa Grilo confessed to João de Sousa that she was the one who killed her husband, Luís Grilo.
After the “discovery of new vestiges” in the Cachoeiras house, says the MP, Tânia Reis called, “at 1:00 pm” on February 14, 2020, the local GNR, which “gathered the elements previously placed there by the defendants, drawing up a report of news, also describing the seizures carried out and proceeding with the evidentiary preservation of such traces”. The prosecution notes that, on February 18, in the trial of the 1st instance, Tânia Reis, as Rosa Grilo’s lawyer, asked the jury court that, “in view of the new elements obtained (…), the investigation should be carried out”. ” by João de Sousa, as a witness, and “to the exhumation of the body of Luís Grilo, so that new forensic analyzes could be carried out (…)”. The request would be rejected by the presiding judge, Ana Clara Batista. Tânia Reis would insist on the request for those steps, after the judge set the date for the reading of the sentence. In vain.
In her order, Criminal Investigation Judge (JIC) Dora Dinis notes that, between July 20, 2018 and November 22, 2018, PJ inspectors and technicians from the Scientific Police Laboratory carried out five searches to collect evidence throughout the city. housing for the Grilo couple, including the bedroom (suite) and the bathroom. “There were no capsules, ammo or casing under the bathtub, nor in the dresser drawers, nor in the jewelry box, nor were there any holes in the bathtub,” she writes. “Without great effort, it will be concluded that only the defense of Rosa Grilo, headed by the defendants, was interested in the new ‘planted’ evidence, (…) to question the version of the facts contained in the prosecution” against the widow, he adds. Therefore, the JIC justifies the indictment of Tânia Reis and João de Sousa with a “prognostic judgment highly favorable to the existence of a conviction” in trial, for the crime of personal favoritism.
“I’m going to go to trial”
To VISION, the lawyer alleges that she and João de Sousa, with a key delivered by Américo Pina, Rosa Grilo’s father, and with her consent, went to observe the Cachoeiras house on February 14, 2020, for the forensic advisor ” to investigate and see the situation and the place, so that I can speak in court as a witness that I have named”. When they arrived at a “certain division”, he continues, João de Sousa “verified that something was there”. He says they immediately left the house and called “the authorities”.
Tânia Reis says she is surprised by the process by which she will be judged. “In my sponsorship duty, I have to do everything in my power to exercise a good mandate”, she argues. “I’ll be calm for this trial, as the defendant”, she guarantees, although she is facing in parallel a disciplinary process by the Order, which awaits the outcome of the case, for possible sanctions.
But if Tânia Reis renounced the defense of Rosa Grilo, João de Sousa maintained contact with the widow. On May 2, 2021, that former PJ inspector, convicted of corruption (see box), posted on his YouTube channel the recording of a phone call he made to Rosa Grilo, serving time in Tires jail, in which the Widow assumes responsibility for her husband’s murder.
Without there being any disputes regarding Rosa Grilo’s consent for the phone call to be recorded and publicized, and the authenticity of her voice, the widow is heard to say: “Yes, it was me, doctor, it was me who killed Luís .” Rosa Grilo also confesses that she invented the robbery of the “Angolans” at the couple’s residence, to which she attributed the murder of Luís Grilo, and says that she killed her husband with the pistol of her then-lover, António Joaquim.
It will be seen what legal consequences this confession could have, both in the trial of Tânia Reis and João de Sousa, as in an extraordinary appeal for review of the sentence, which Ricardo Serrano Vieira, lawyer for António Joaquim, tells VISÃO that he will file in the Supreme. In the final judgment of the case, António Joaquim ended up as the author of the shot that killed Luís Grilo…
The “omnipresent”
Tânia Reis with João de Sousa (with glasses)
Former PJ inspector convicted of corruption, João de Sousa created a blog in which he unraveled Socrates’ secrets in Évora jail and became Rosa Grilo’s confidant
Designer suits, haughty pose, assumed ego. So was the PJ inspector from Setúbal João de Sousa. Known as the CSI inspector, he impressed the PJ interns he dealt with: he bet heavily on technical and forensic expertise – in homicide cases, for example, his specialty. He also displayed an above-average psychological skill, extracting impossible confessions using only mental artifices. Until, in 2014, he was preventively arrested, on suspicion of involvement with a network that was dedicated to the fraudulent sale of gold. He ended up sentenced to five years and six months in prison for passive corruption, unlawful receipt of an advantage and violation of employee secrecy. And expelled from the PJ, where he worked for about 18 years.
From the Évora jail, he created a blog of growing popularity, which he called Dos Dois Lados das Grades, especially when he coincided with José Sócrates, placed in preventive detention by Judge Carlos Alexandre. It was through João de Sousa’s blog that we learned, for example, about the problem of fleas in Socrates’ cell and the former prime minister’s stubbornness in wearing boots that violated prison regulations. They became friends, sharing books and confidences, to the point of getting angry because of João de Sousa’s criticism of Socrates’ behavior.
Released in 2018, João de Sousa would emerge the following year as a “forensic advisor” to lawyer Tânia Reis, who defends Rosa Grilo. “Everyone has the right to a second chance”, says Tânia Reis to VISÃO, while praising João de Sousa’s “forensic skills”. So much so, that he continued to hire him for defense in more complex homicide cases.
Meanwhile, João de Sousa became a kind of confidant of the widow convicted of the murder of her husband, the triathlete Luís Grilo. On May 2, 2021, he posted on his YouTube channel the audio recording of a phone call he made to Rosa Grilo, to the Tires jail, in which the widow assumes that she killed her husband. Then she comments: “Do not believe that there is any crystal ball here; there is only technicality – but when it is not perceived by others, it even seems like something from another world.”
