Francisco García Escalero was born in Madrid on May 24, 1948. Spanish accounts describe a sickly and odd child with almost no schooling, and an adult life spent between the street, alcohol and drugs, prisons and psychiatric institutions. At seventeen he took part in an attack on a couple at night in which the woman was raped while her boyfriend was made to watch. He served twelve years for it and was free again at thirty.
From 1987 he killed people sleeping rough in and around Madrid. He was living the same way himself, which is how he found them and why nobody connected the deaths. Investigators quoted in the Spanish press called them the perfect victims: people the city treated as invisible, whose absence took days or weeks to be noticed. The bodies were mutilated, some dismembered, some burned. He also had sex with corpses, including bodies he dug up in a cemetery, which is the origin of the other name the press gave him, the son of the cemetery.
The part of this case that should be uncomfortable is how much warning there was. On December 15, 1990 he was admitted to the provincial psychiatric hospital in Madrid and told the staff that he had fits of wanting to kill, and that he could not be in a room with another person because anyone's presence set off the urge. He had already killed several times by then. He described his crimes, and at one point had accounted for thirteen of them. The confessions were written off as the products of a schizophrenic imagination, and he was let go again.
The end came in 1994. After he absconded, a man's body was found beside La Almudena cemetery with the head crushed and the remains burned. Escalero threw himself into traffic and broke a leg. In hospital he told the nurses that he had to be taken to a prison at once, that he was a serial killer, and that if he stayed free he would kill again. He was arrested in April 1994 and then confessed to each killing in turn.
He said he had committed fourteen murders. He was charged with eleven. The count here is those eleven, with the confessed figure recorded as his own claim.
What happened to him afterwards is reported inconsistently in Spanish sources. Some say he received thirty years for the eleven; others say he was found not criminally responsible and committed to a secure psychiatric hospital. He was never in ordinary prison for these killings. He died in the psychiatric unit at Fontcalent in Alicante on August 19, 2014, aged sixty-six.
Two further details are widely reported and are worth stating as reports rather than findings: that he practised cannibalism, and that the first killing was in 1986 rather than 1987, which would make the series seven years long.