A judge has ordered the exhumation of a Spanish aristocrat so a posthumous paternity test can be carried out at the request of a woman who claims to be his daughter.
The 66-year-old woman from Écija, in southern Spain, named by Spanish media as Rosario Bermudo Muñoz, says that José Leoncio González de Gregorio Martí, who died in 2008, had a short affair as a young man with her mother, an employee in his home.
Ms Bermudo Muñoz believes a DNA test will make her a legitimate heir to his fortune, a claim contested by his family. “The mother of the plaintiff became pregnant when she reached adulthood and she had to look after herself alone and in awful conditions,” said her lawyer, Fernando Osuna.
‘Least macabre option’
“First, we tried the least macabre option, which was to carry out these tests on [González de Gregorio Martí’s] acknowledged biological children, but they refused several times. That’s why we have resorted to exhumation.”
Mr Osuna estimated his client is owed €2 million- €4 million in inheritance.
This unusual paternity case is yet another chapter in an already bitter inheritance saga for the family. It also adds to the extraordinary story of Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo, the Duchess of Medina Sidonia, who was married to González de Gregorio Martí between 1955 and 1958 and with whom she had three children. Also known as "the Red Duchess", she was an outspoken campaigner against Franco's right-wing dictatorship.
Deathbed marriage
On her deathbed in 2008, the duchess married her secretary, a German woman called Liliane Dahlmann. Ever since then, the children of the duchess and González de Gregorio Martí have been trying to wrest back control of the massive historical archive that their mother passed on to Ms Dahlmann.
The duchess, a novelist and historian, was jailed for several months in the 1960s, after demonstrating against nuclear tests carried out in Andalusia. She went into exile in the south of France in the 1970s, rubbing shoulders with members of the Basque terrorist group Eta.
