The Asunta Case on Netflix: The horrific true story of the parents who brutally killed their adopted daughter

The shocking case of a young Chinese girl who was murdered by her adoptive parents has inspired Netflix's latest true crime series.

Asunta Yong Fang Basterra Porto was just shy of 13 when she was reported missing by Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra.

The divorced couple were convicted of her murder in 2013 in a trial which devastated Spain. The Asunta Case explores how a couple so desperate to give a child a new life, instead cruelly took it away.

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The limited six-part series, released on Friday April 25, stars Candela Peña, Tristán Ulloa and Javier Gutiérrez. The show's synopsis reads: "On September 21st 2013 Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra report the disappearance of their daughter Asunta, whose body is found hours after next to a road outside Santiago de Compostela.

"The police investigation soon reveals evidence that points to Rosario and Alfonso as possible authors of the crime. The news shakes the city and even the country. What can lead two parents to end their daughter's life? What hides beneath that perfect family picture?"

We take a look at the true story behind the drama...

What happened to Asunta?

Struggling to conceive a child of their own, married couple Porto, a lawyer, and Basterra, a journalist, decided to adopt. Living in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, northwestern Spain, they travelled to Yongzhou, Hunan, China and brought home a happy baby girl.

It was a landmark adoption: Asunta was the first Chinese child to be adopted in the city of Santiago and one of the first in all of Galicia. A gifted child, she appeared to thrive in her new home, excelling in ballet, violin and piano and even skipping a year at school.

But behind her supposedly happy life lay a sinister story. First her parents' marriage broke down. The couple split when Basterra found out Porto had been cheating in early 2013. Sickeningly, they then began drugging 12-year-old Asunta, blaming side effects of drowsiness and confusion on hay fever tablets.

Months later, she was dead. Porto and Basterra were found guilty of murdering their daughter and dumping her body on a forest trail near Santiago in September 2013.

The pair were found to have suffocated Asunta with a length of rope with Porto dumping the body. Her corpse was found just miles away from Porto's holiday home in Teo, with rope identical to that found in her home.

Prosecutors claimed that the grisly murder was planned by both parents, but carried out by Porto who had reported her missing a few hours before she was found. The court had heard they had tested the sedative Orfidal on Asunta for several months, assessing its impact on her before finally giving a dose powerful enough to knock her out.

During the trial it emerged that Basterra had pictures on his computer of Asunta in provocative clothing and his DNA “from a bodily fluid other than semen” was found on her underwear. The court also heard that Porto had long suffered from depression and told a psychiatrist in 2009 that the child “bothered her”.

Porto had claimed that she had found an intruder attacking Asunta in her bedroom but scared him off. The pair denied any involvement in the killing of their daughter.

They were both sentenced to prison for 18 years in November 2015.

Where are Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra now?

The divorced couple didn't stay in touch after they were jailed. A year later, The High Court of Justice of Galicia decided that Porto was responsible for her daughter's strangulation as there was no proof of Basterra getting into the car and accompanying her.

However it maintained his original sentence for helping to plot the murder. That October, the second chamber of the Supreme Court Court upheld the sentence. Basterra is now 59 years old and still has six years of left to serve.

Porto was moved prisons three times and eventually killed herself. She'd made two previous attempts. In 2017 she was staying in Teixeiro prison near her hometown when she was told she'd be moved 40 miles away to A Lama in Pontevedra. She took an overdose of sleeping pills in an act of what prison sources called 'attention-seeking' behaviour. She was found unconscious and rushed to hospital where she made a full recovery.

Porto then attempted to hang herself in the shower block of her new jail, but stopped when another prisoner appeared.

In March 2020 she was sent even further away, this time some 380 miles away to Brieva women's prison in Ávila. It was there, eight months later, on November 18, that she committed suicide by hanging.

The Asunta Case is available to stream now on Netflix.