Around 4:40 Wednesday evening in the Supreme Court before Justice Herbert Lord, former soldier in the Belize Defence Force (BDF) and security guard, Glenford “Bucket” Bermudez, 40, was found guilty of murder by a jury of nine women and three men after four hours and twenty-one minutes in deliberation.
Bermudez was accused of killing his taxi operator wife of three years, Raquel Requeña Bermudez, 41, of Hattieville, a mother of 7 children, with a single shot to the head on the Burrell Boom-Hattieville Road on November 22, 2007.
The couple, who had one child together, were estranged at the time. Bermudez was driving a passenger, Cynthia Andrews, and her child (Andrews’ child), south on the road toward the Hattieville/Western Highway roundabout junction from the Kolbe Prison around 12:30 in the afternoon in her maroon Toyota when a blue-colored vehicle going in the opposite direction swerved into her path and forced her to stop.
Andrews, testifying for the prosecution, told the court that after the vehicles stopped, a dark-skinned man came out of the blue vehicle, pointed a shotgun at Raquel’s head at close range, and fired twice, the first shot hitting the deceased in the head and the second missing.
Luis Cambranes, who was driving his vehicle behind the deceased’s on the road, also witnessed the incident, but in court neither he nor Andrews could positively identify Bermudez, because, they said, they were too frightened by what had transpired and did not get a good look at him.
Andrews told the court that she left the scene shortly after the shooting.
Glenford Fuller, who was along with two friends at the Hattieville dumpsite that afternoon, told the court in his testimony that he witnessed a man come into the area, cut a wire from an abandoned washing machine, tie it to a nearby tree and attempt to hang himself with it. They were able to halt the attempted suicide, but the man ran off after he revived.
Police recovered two expended shells from the murder scene as well as the gun suspected to be the murder weapon, thought to be Bermudez’s work-issued firearm. Bermudez himself was caught by police in Burrell Boom village later in the day.
Bermudez had given a caution statement to police, later admitted as evidence in the trial, in which he claimed that a mysterious man known to him only as “Hyde” boarded his vehicle, forced him to stop his wife’s vehicle, and forcibly put the gun in his hand and pulled the trigger.
Bermudez gave a dock statement during the trial in which he admitted to being at the scene at the time of the murder, but denied pulling the trigger and blamed Raquel’s death on “Hyde,” whom he said orchestrated the entire event. He claimed that he escaped from “Hyde’s” clutches when the mystery man stopped to make a phone call, and heard a gunshot as he left the scene, but denied trying to hang himself that day.
Bermudez was defended by attorney Carlo Mason, while crown counsel Sherniza Smith prosecuted her first major case.
About three weeks before the fatal incident, the murder victim and Bermudez had engaged in a public fight near a supermarket in Belize City that resulted in court action. Raquel put Glenford out of her house, we were told, and began seeing another man, provoking the raging jealousy that apparently led to her death.
Justice Lord will sentence Bermudez on Thursday, May 12, 2011.