On the night of November 23, 2004, María Isabel Bascuñana, twenty-one, a law student at the University of Lleida in Catalonia, told her parents at about ten o'clock that she would not be home for dinner. Two days later her body was found in the trunk of her own car, parked a few streets from the Illa de l'Oci entertainment complex near the law faculty. A handkerchief was tied around her neck, and her body had been wrapped in garbage bags. She had been raped. The man the Mossos d'Esquadra arrested on December 1 was the complex's parking attendant, an Ecuadorian named Gilberto Antonio Chamba Jaramillo, and he had killed before.
Chamba was born in Machala, in the Ecuadorian province of El Oro, on October 5, 1963. He married a woman named Mariela and had daughters with her. From 1988 to 1993 he drove his own taxi around Machala, apparently looking for fares, and picked out young female students who were traveling alone.
He raped and strangled eight women, two of them minors. Among the dead were Mariana Elisabeth Muñoz Zambrano; Mercy Marlene Rodríguez Farías, who directed the band at the Simón Bolívar school and who stopped his car for a ride and fell asleep on the way; and Sara Enderica Briones, sixteen. Fausto Terán, a retired police officer who took part in the capture, told El Mundo that by Chamba's own account he had not raped his victims vaginally but violated them with a cane-like instrument he had had made to order. The Ecuadorian press named him the Monster of Machala.
On April 7, 1993, he attacked Delia Villavicencio, who got away injured, reported him and later picked out his face and his car for the local police. He was arrested in El Oro on April 19. The officers doubted the scale of his confessions at first and tried to trip him up by driving him to places far from the real scenes; he corrected them without emotion and led them back to the right ones. He was charged with eight murders and two rapes, and the testimony of a surviving woman, a sex worker, carried the prosecution. The court sentenced him to sixteen years, then the maximum under Ecuadorian law. A law that halved the sentences of well-behaved prisoners, and a further year taken off for the Great Jubilee of 2000, cut the time he served to about seven.
He was freed in March 2000, and under Ecuadorian law his criminal record was wiped clean. On November 9 of that year he flew to Amsterdam and on to Madrid's Barajas airport, where two of his sisters were waiting, and settled in Lleida, where he soon made his residence legal. He worked as a mason and as the doorman of his own building, where he lived with his family and with a series of girlfriends. In September 2004 he took the job at Illa de l'Oci, minding the parking and helping the crews who cleaned the cinemas.
Bascuñana's friends told the Mossos that Chamba had pestered her whenever she left or collected her car. Other young women said he routinely asked for their phone numbers, telling them he could call if anything happened to their cars, and many of them afterward received sexually harassing calls. Records from Bascuñana's phone showed two calls to phone-sex lines, of five and six minutes, in the hours around her death. Garbage bags in her glove compartment matched the ones around her body and were the industrial brand the cinema cleaners used. His co-workers testified that they had noticed nothing that night and that he had not left his post, and neighbors described him as a kind man, but DNA from semen on her body was his. He claimed the police had taken semen from a condom he had used and planted it. He had also kept his Ecuadorian past from investigators until the Ecuadorian and Catalan police established that he was the man convicted in Machala. Ecuadorian newspapers, whose files held the whole story, published it at once, and the Spanish police were sharply criticized for never having checked.
The Audiencia of Lleida sentenced him in November 2006 to forty-five years: twenty for the murder, twelve for the rape and thirteen for the attempted rape and murder of a Romanian woman working as a prostitute, who testified against him after recognizing him from pictures in the local press. Spain's Supreme Court upheld the sentence in 2007. Spanish law caps the time actually served, and in November 2024 officials said he was expected to leave Quatre Camins prison, near Barcelona, on November 29, 2029, and that the National Police would expel him from Spain on his release.