HOUSTON – A woman accused of faking her husband’s death to collect $26 million in life insurance testified Friday that she had no idea he was insured until after he died.
Blanca Monica Villarreal said that days after the death of her husband, Mexico City businessman Eduardo Rosendi, she found two insurance policies in a lockbox where he stored valuables in their home.
Testifying in Spanish with an interpreter, she said she didn’t know what the papers were, since they were written in English.
She showed them to her adult son, who explained that they were life insurance policies, and that she was their beneficiary. One was for $10 million from Transamerica Corp., the other for $16 million from Pruco Life Insurance Co., a subsidiary of Prudential Financial.
“Lalo never told me anything like that,” she testified, using what she said was one of her two nicknames for Rosendi. (The other was Cielo, or Sky, because he was so much taller than she was.)
“I married him for love.… I loved him for himself, nothing else,” she added.
Her testimony came on the fifth day of a civil trial before a jury in the court of Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal. The trial is expected to conclude next week.
Transamerica and Pruco sued Villarreal in 2017, claiming she and Rosendi were part of an elaborate swindle.
First, the insurers say, Rosendi obtained the term insurance policies in 2014 by submitting phony financial statements in which he claimed to be a software company CEO with a net worth of $70 million. Then, they say, Villarreal tried to claim the benefits by falsely reporting that Rosendi died of a heart attack Dec. 29, 2016. His remains, she told the insurers, were cremated the next day.
Villarreal, 46, testified that she knew almost nothing about her husband’s business, absolutely nothing about his financial status, and precious little about his life before they met in August 2015 and married 14 months later.
“It was a short period of time, but it was a beautiful time,” she said when questioned by her lawyer, Shalimar Wallis of Watts Guerra in San Antonio.
She added, “My mother always taught me from early on to love someone for who they are, not what they have…. I never asked him about how much he had.”
Transamerica and Pruco say Villarreal’s professed lack of even the most basic knowledge of her husband’s affairs and background is evidence that their “love,” and their marriage just three months before his supposed death, were necessary steps in the ruse to steal the insurance money.
They contend that Rosendi is secretly alive.
“Of all the evidence you will see in this case, you will not see a photo of Mr. Rosendi’s dead body. It doesn’t exist,” Laura Leigh Geist, a partner in the San Francisco/Oakland office of Dentons and one of the lawyers for Pruco, said in her opening statement on Monday.
She added, “Eduardo Rosendi faked his life in order to fake his death to get the insurance money.”
Questioning Villarreal on Friday, Geist said: “Ms. Villarreal, there’s not one witness who’s going to walk into this courtroom and say Mr. Rosendi was worth $70 million, is there?”
“I don’t have any knowledge of that,” the witness replied.
Villarreal said her husband’s driver, Isaac Diaz, handled her husband’s embalming, wake and cremation because she was paralyzed with grief after coming home from the grocery store on the evening of Dec. 29, 2016, to find a physician at her home who told her, “Eduardo is no longer with us.” Rosendi was 49.
She said she remembers little of the following hours and days.
“My head was not right,” she said. “My soul was aching.”
Speaking softly, at times barely audible, she told the jury she’s a Mary Kay representative from León, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, where she was raised by her single mother. She met Rosendi in a casino on a visit to Mexico City. Asked what she first noticed about him, she smiled and said, “He won.”
She said they began seeing each other almost immediately: He would visit her in León, or she would come to Mexico City.
She said she learned she was pregnant in May of 2016 – one month after Rosendi’s divorce from another woman became final. She told Rosendi in July that she was expecting, and they married in October.
“We were just beginning our lives together,” she said.
Their son, Javier, was born Feb. 17, 2017.
Before Rosendi died, she testified, he said of the child she was carrying, “He’s not going to lack for anything.”