Two men ran away together from the Alonso Vega psychiatric hospital in Madrid, where García Escalero had admitted himself voluntarily in 1993, and went drinking. Forty-eight hours later one of them, Víctor Luis Criado, was found against the wall of the church of the Sagrados Corazones with his skull crushed and his body burned among papers and blankets. The man he had left with was his friend and drinking companion, a homeless man named Francisco García Escalero, and it was this death that finally put the police on his trail, seven years after the first killing.
Before they found him, he threw himself in front of a moving car. He broke a leg. In the hospital he told the nurses that they had to take him to a prison at once, that he was a killer, and that if he stayed free he would kill again. He was arrested in April 1994 and began to talk. "I bought plenty of wine, and he drank too," he said of Criado. "I remember I hit him on the head with a stone, and then I burned him." From there he went through the killings one by one, fourteen of them, sparing no detail, including the satisfaction he took in sex with the bodies and how hard some of the killings had been for him. The Madrid papers reported a homeless man of thirty-nine who had killed eleven people in cold blood.
He grew up in a shantytown two hundred meters from the Almudena cemetery, a withdrawn, solitary boy who liked to walk among the burial niches at night. He barely went to school and was often ill. His suicidal impulses showed early, and he threw himself at cars; his father answered with brutal beatings. He was first admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1970; at sixteen he stole a motorcycle and spent four years in a reformatory; and then, with friends, attacked a couple near the Almudena at night and raped the young woman while her boyfriend was made to watch. He was sentenced to twelve years. In prison he covered himself in tattoos, one of which read "Born to suffer."
After prison he took to drink and pills and became aggressive and violent, and he began to hear voices telling him to kill and to desecrate cemeteries. The first killing attributed to him was Paula Martínez, a woman the Spanish press describes as a prostitute, whom he met on Calle Capitán Haya; in August 1987 she was found on the outskirts of Madrid, decapitated and burned. In March 1989 a beggar named Ángel was found half-decapitated with his fingertips cut off. In May 1989 Julio, a homeless man of sixty-five, was found stabbed many times, mutilated and burned. Five more victims followed in the same condition.
The violence grew with each killing. He stabbed his victims repeatedly in the back, crushed their skulls with stones or simply cut off their heads, and sometimes cut out organs with a knife and, by his account, tasted them. To destroy traces he burned what was left and sliced off the pads of the fingers. He had sex with some of the bodies, and he climbed the walls of the Almudena, broke open niches and abused corpses he pulled from the graves, which gave the press its other name for him, the son of the cemetery. The victims were people living on the street, whose deaths drew little attention and for years were not connected.
There had been warnings. On December 15, 1990, he was admitted to the provincial psychiatric hospital in Madrid and told the staff he had fits of wanting to kill and could not share a room, because any other person's presence set off the urge. At one point he had described thirteen killings. The confessions were written off as schizophrenic delusions, and he was let go.
He was tried in 1995, and the Audiencia Provincial de Madrid found eleven murders proved. The forensic psychiatrists agreed that he remained dangerous but was not responsible for his acts, citing schizophrenia, chronic alcoholism and necrophilia among other conditions, and the court applied the exemption for mental disorder, acquitted him and ordered him held in the prison psychiatric hospital at Fontcalent in Alicante. The presiding magistrate was José Manuel Maza, who found him unfit to live among other prisoners. The forensic psychiatrists called his a case of double failure: an illness, the paradigm of madness, that had kept him from developing in harmony with himself and others, and a resounding failure of society and its institutions, which had not detected or prevented the killings, as ABC reported on February 20, 1996. Accounts date the trial to February 1995 and the judgment to 1996. Some Spanish reports say he was sentenced to thirty years; the court record as usually summarized says he was acquitted and committed.
Staff at Fontcalent said he was gentle and never showed violence again. There he claimed several dozen more killings, which were not believed. On August 19, 2014, he went into a side room off the common room with a plum from his supper and was found dead; the autopsy could not say whether his heart had failed or he had choked. His birth date is given in most Spanish reporting as May 24, 1954, which fits the press reports in 1994 that he was thirty-nine and would make him sixty at his death, and elsewhere as May 24, 1948. El Independiente dates the eleven proved killings from mid-1987 to September 1993, while other accounts place Criado's death in 1994. His birthplace is given as Madrid and as Zamora, and accounts differ on whether the first killing was in 1986 or 1987.