José José’s two elder children say their half-sister won’t reveal where the body is, while the showbiz media stokes the feud

This article is more than 11 months old

This article is more than 11 months old

Mexican crooner José José specialized in heart-wrenching ballads which turned him into an icon of extreme Latin American romanticism. Since his death on Saturday, a bitter family battle for control of his body has converted his afterlife into a telenovela.

José José – known as El Príncipe de la Canción, or the Prince of Song – died in Miami on Saturday. He was 71 and was known to have pancreatic cancer.

At first, things all followed the celebrity death rulebook: tributes rolled in for the legendary entertainer famed for his vocal range, impeccable suits and redemptive struggle with alcohol and cocaine abuse.

Social media buzzed with footage showing passengers on a Mexico City bus bursting into a spontaneous rendition of his most famous hit, El Triste, or The Sad One.

But public mourning quickly gave way to fascination with a family feud, stoked by the showbiz media on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

The singer, whose legal name was José Rómulo Sosa Ortiz, had been living in Miami since February 2018 with Sarita Sosa, his youngest daughter and only child from his third marriage.

José Joel and Marysol Sosa, his other two children from an earlier marriage, have publicly accused Sarita of kidnapping their father, preventing him from seeing them, and manipulating him into signing over control of his life and legacy.

The day after the singer’s death, the two elder siblings were filmed pleading with Sarita to tell them where their father’s body was as they visited funeral parlours around Miami, pursued by a swarm of reporters.

“We have every right to see my father,” Marysol told the Mexican network TV Azteca. “My half-sister has a lot to explain to me – and to all of Mexico.”

Sarita, meanwhile, gave two studio interviews in which she insisted she had never tried to block her siblings seeing their dad.

“Aside from our differences, now is the time to be united,” she told the US network Telemundo. “If they come out and say something else, that’s a matter for them.”

The public’s mounting obsession with the story has been further fuelled by mudslinging between prominent showbiz TV presenters accusing each other of taking sides, or paying for exclusives.

Postmortem controversies are not uncommon for Mexico’s most iconic entertainers. After the singer Juan Gabriel died in 2016, rumours spread that he was still alive and that he faked his own death to escape the pressures of his fame.

The whirlwind around José José calmed after the Mexican consulate in Miami confirmed that the body was in fact in a funeral parlour under the control of Sarita.

But it remained unclear if José Joel and Marysol had seen their father’s body – let alone in which country he would finally be buried and who will inherit his estate.