The Last Hours of Mario Biondo, what is the truth? Suicide for Spain, murder for Italy

The story is a sad one, with a victim. His name was Mario Biondoa handsome man in his 30s, was a cameraman and married to Raquel Sanchez Silva, a famous Spanish television presenter. Then on May 30, 2013 he was found dead, hanged with a pashmina in a library of his home in Madrid.

Suicide or murder?

His family could never believe that Mario had taken his own life: “I won’t rest until my son’s killers are in prison,” his mother Santina D’Alessandro screamed loudly.

His wife, Raquel, in recent years has often been suspected, if not as responsible for the death, however as a person involved in the facts, reluctant to collaborate with justice.

The Spanish police, on the other hand, never had any doubts: “Mario killed himself”.

The conclusion, however, is that in 2022 the investigating judge of Palermo Nicholas Aiello dismissed the investigation into the boy’s death due to procedural limitations due “to the distance from the facts”.

Now a docu-series is out on Netflix, The Last Hours of Mario Biondoin which, in three episodes, he tries to reconstruct what happened on the day of the cameraman’s death.

“From what I’ve seen,” the lawyer intervenes Fabio Falcone, who together with Carmelita Morrale has brought forward, on behalf of Mario Biondo’s family, the thesis of the murder, «The series gives a contrary imprint to our judicial path, which does not surprise me since in any case it was produced by Guillermo Gómez, former manager of Raquel Sánchez Silva. The hypothesis of a practice of self-asphyxiation is supported, a game of auto-eroticism pushed to the extreme, something that has never appeared in judicial documents”.

So, according to what is implied in the series, could it have been an accident, a sort, so to speak, of involuntary suicide?
“In that death there are so many things that don’t add up. Even the investigating judge Nicola Aiello, who closed the case, did so by saying that too much time had passed, that there weren’t enough elements to go on, but he didn’t believe in the suicide hypothesis either, or in any case it wasn’t what as obvious as the Spanish police wanted it to be. The elements taken from the Public Prosecutor’s file, in the opinion of the judge, deny the suicidal thesis and suggest that Mario Biondo was killed by an unknown hand and subsequently placed in a position capable of simulating suicide».

The lawyer Carmelita Morrale goes even more straight: «This documentary, if it can be called that, does not correspond to the procedural reality that emerged from the judicial documents. Mario was not a drug user: the toxicologist who worked on behalf of the prosecutor’s office took a lock of Mario’s hair and nothing was found. A forcing, therefore, that of the film that wants to portray him as a habitual and inveterate cocaine addict. As far as erotomania is concerned, even hers cannot be demonstrated: the only searches Mario had done on porn sites concerned his wife’s name, as if he had doubts about her. The searches that appeared on his computer relating to the practice of self-asphyxiation were all done after her death. In addition, the mobile phone was never handed over to the Italian authorities: it was a smartphone registered to the company for which Mrs. Raquel’s cousin worked and they appealed to this not to hand it over. The prosecutors were only able to consult the desktop and laptop computers and from these devices it was ascertained that someone had accessed Mario’s computer remotely. To do what?”.

The series talks about an insurance policy, which Mario Biondo’s family could have collected if the murder had been proven…
«The Biondos had no interest in collecting that insurance, especially since the first payment had not yet been paid and that insurance was not even operational. Who knows why in the movie they wanted to point their fingers right there. The Biondos wanted to get to the bottom of the insurance story certainly not to collect the money, but to understand if there could be other people’s interests in killing their son».

But can this film somehow help to reopen the case and tell the facts or is it misleading?
“No, it doesn’t help. There are things that don’t add up: the magistrates have never been told anything about the auto-erotic accident before this series. This hypothesis emerged in a journalistic way, in an instrumental way, to pass Mario off as a boy addicted to the use of drugs and with a questionable reputation. All this time, had it been so, the widow would have talked about it. And then how is it that in a documentary, which comes out 10 years after his death, the voice of two alleged employees of this Puta-Club is broadcast, the place with the escorts where Mario would have gone, without however showing their faces , without indicating their name? It tastes like fake reconstruction, to discredit the memory of a boy who can no longer defend himself ».

But why did the mother, father and brothers in this film have so little on their side?
«When Messrs. Biondo signed the contract to authorize the filming, there was the name of a company other than the one that then managed the production and which turned out to be Guillermo Gómez, who had an interest in releasing another version of events. The family has already activated lawyers in Spain and now we will see how to proceed. Of course, if they had known from the beginning what was going to come out, they would never have given their consent to participate in this docu-series. Everything was done without revealing who was behind the production».

“The idea, therefore, is that we want to accredit the figure of Raquel”, concludes the lawyer Fabio Falcone.

Meanwhile her life has gone on: since 2014, the year following the death of Mario Biondo, Raquel Sanchez Silva is related to the Argentine audiovisual producer Matias Dumont, with whom she has two children.