The Femicide of Valentina Trespalacios

Valentina Trespalacios

Valentina Trespalacios was a 23-year-old DJ living and working in Bogotá. She and John Nelson Poulos, a U.S. citizen who traveled repeatedly to Colombia, had been in a romantic relationship during 2022 and early 2023.

On January 22, 2023, Valentina was found dead in the Fontibón area of Bogotá. Authorities quickly focused on Poulos, who had left Colombia. He was detained during a stop in Panama after Colombian authorities sought his capture and was returned to Bogotá for criminal proceedings.

The charge and the prosecution case

Prosecutors charged Poulos with aggravated femicide together with concealment, alteration or destruction of physical evidence. The prosecution argued that the killing occurred in the context of controlling and abusive intimate-partner behavior.

Colombia's Procuraduría, participating in the proceeding, said evidence at trial showed a pattern of control that included monitoring Valentina's social-media activity and hiring a private investigator to watch her. The institution asked the court to treat the killing as aggravated femicide rather than an ordinary homicide.

What Poulos said — and what he did not confess to

During the trial, Poulos denied intentionally killing Valentina. In March 2024, a wave of headlines claimed that he had confessed to her murder. A review of the hearing by El País found that claim to be false.

Poulos gave an account in which he said he awoke and found Valentina dead and did not remember exactly what had happened. He did acknowledge moving her body, abandoning it and trying to leave the country. Those admissions were not a confession to intentional murder. That distinction matters because a defendant's own version should not be rewritten after the fact simply because a court later rejects it.

The trial court rejects the defense account

The trial court ultimately did reject Poulos's explanation of an accidental death. On June 4, 2024, Bogotá's Tenth Criminal Court found him guilty of aggravated femicide and concealment, alteration or destruction of evidence.

The judge imposed a sentence of 42 years and eight months in prison. Contemporary reporting described the judgment as a first-instance conviction, and Poulos's defense announced that it would appeal.

Why this page does not overstate appellate finality

Later reporting in November 2025 continued to describe Poulos as convicted and serving the 42-year sentence after a transfer to the high-security La Tramacúa prison. However, the reliable public sources reviewed for this 2026 update did not establish for this file a later appellate merits judgment conclusively resolving the announced appeal.

Crime by Region therefore does not call the case an acquittal, nor does it pretend that the appeal erased the trial judgment. The accurate position from the material reviewed is that a conviction was entered and Poulos was serving the resulting sentence, while the defense had announced appellate litigation whose final merits disposition was not identified here.

Timeline

Current status

The case is partly adjudicated for this archive. John Nelson Poulos was convicted at trial of aggravated femicide and an evidence-concealment offense and sentenced to 42 years and eight months. The defense announced an appeal; no reliable later appellate merits decision was located in the sources reviewed for this page. The standing trial conviction should not be confused with either a final appellate affirmance or an acquittal.

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