Between April 1987 and April 1988, sixteen elderly women who lived alone died in their homes in and around Santander, the capital of Cantabria on Spain's northern coast. Most of the deaths were first recorded as natural. In May 1988 police arrested José Antonio Rodríguez Vega, a bricklayer who had done small building jobs for several of the women, and who had been out of prison on conditional release since serving part of a sentence for rape. In December 1991 the Audiencia Provincial de Santander convicted him of all sixteen murders and sentenced him to a total reported as 440 years, with no more than 30 to be served under the law then in force. The Tribunal Supremo upheld the judgment in 1993.
He spent fourteen years in Spanish prisons. In October 2002 he was transferred to the prison at Topas, near Salamanca, and two days later he was killed there by other inmates. The press had long since given him the name by which the case is still known in Spain, El Mataviejas.
Rodríguez Vega was born in Santander on December 3, 1957, according to Infobae and VICE España. Cantabria24Horas, in a long account of the case published in 2016, described him as the fourth of six children in a family of modest means.
His family life was troubled from early on. Infobae reported that as a teenager he was aggressive toward his mother and his sister, and that after a violent episode against his father, who was disabled, the family agreed not to report him on condition that he leave home. He left in 1974, at 17. VICE España gave a similar account, saying he was thrown out of the house after attacking his sick father and that it was his mother who asked him to go. In later years he blamed his mother, and his mother-in-law, for what he had become; the trial court noted the same thing in 1991.
At 18 he married. Infobae wrote that neighbors saw him as a responsible husband and an affectionate father to the couple's son. He worked in construction as a bricklayer, which later gave him a reason to be in other people's homes.
In October 1978, when he was 20, he was arrested in Santander for a series of sexual assaults. Infobae dates the arrest to October 17, 1978, and says he was caught in the act after a witness called the police. Cantabria24Horas wrote that the Guardia Civil made the arrest, and that he admitted to five known cases. The press called him the rapist on the motorbike; VICE España gives the nickname as "el violador de la moto," and Infobae as "el Violador de la Vespa."
In 1979 he was sentenced to a combined 27 years in prison, according to Cantabria24Horas and VICE España. Infobae reports that he was charged with twelve rapes. Most of the women later forgave him, which under the Spanish Penal Code in force before 1995 could extinguish criminal liability for offenses of that kind; Infobae wrote that eleven of the twelve did so, with the support of his mother and sister. His wife left him after this conviction and took their son, according to Cantabria24Horas and Infobae.
How long he served depends on the account. Infobae and Cantabria24Horas say about eight years. Cantabria24Horas wrote that he was released in November 1986 on provisional release, and the Tribunal Supremo's 1993 judgment, as Servimedia reported it, placed the start of the killings in April 1987, when he was on conditional release.
The court found that he killed sixteen women in Santander in 1987 and 1988. Servimedia's report of the verdict in December 1991 gave their ages as 63 to 93; its report of the Supreme Court ruling in 1993 gave them as 61 to 93, the range most later accounts use. All of them lived alone, and many had known him as a pleasant young man who came to do repairs.
Infobae, reviewing the case in 2023, printed a list of the women with their ages and the dates of their deaths. In that list they are Victoria Rodríguez, 61; Simona Salas, 84; Margarita González, 82; Josefina López, 86; Manuela González, 80; Josefina Martínez, 84; Natividad Robledo Espinosa, 66; Catalina Fernández, 93; María Isabel Fernández, 82; María Landazábal, 72; Carmen Martínez, 65; Engracia González, 65; Josefina Quirós, 82; Serena Ángeles Soto, 85; and Julia Paz Fernández, 71. The article names fifteen women, although it describes sixteen victims.
Cantabria24Horas named six of the women. It gave the first as Victoria Rodríguez Morales, 61, who died in April 1987. Margarita González Sánchez, 82, died in August 1987, and her son told the press that the man who killed her did not deserve to live. Natividad Robledo Espinosa, whose age the article gave as 66 and as 67, died in October 1987, as did a woman it named as Josefa Martínez Collantes, 84. Carmen Martínez González, 65, died in January 1988. Julia Paz Fernández, 71, who lived in Muriedas, about 7 kilometers from Santander according to Cantabria24Horas, died in April 1988; she was the last of the sixteen.
Carmen Martínez's death was first recorded as natural. Her daughter refused to accept it and pressed for years to have the death investigated, according to Cantabria24Horas, which wrote that officials warned her not to keep using the word "crime." In 2026 the writer Silvia Cosio, in an essay in Público, named Margarita González, Natividad Roblero (so spelled), Carmen Martínez and Julia Paz Fernández among the victims, and argued that the women had been reduced in the coverage to a single label, "viejas," old women, while the man who killed them became the story.
The Tribunal Supremo found, as Servimedia summarized its 1993 judgment, that he took advantage of the women's physical frailty and acted suddenly after first gaining their trust, and that he robbed them after the assaults. Infobae wrote that he presented himself at their doors as a service worker, a gas inspector, an electricity company employee, a television technician or a bricklayer, and that he did not act on a first visit, but came back several times and was hired for small jobs. VICE España described the same pattern of a friendly tradesman who became a familiar face. At trial it emerged that he had also handed out business cards advertising himself as a bricklayer or television repairman, according to Cantabria24Horas.
All sixteen women died of asphyxia, the courts found. The trial court also found a sadistic sexual deviation directed at elderly women, and convicted him of nine counts of abusos deshonestos, the indecent-assault offense of the Spanish Penal Code of the time.
For months no one connected the deaths. Thirteen of the sixteen were recorded as natural, usually as heart failure, according to Cantabria24Horas, and Cuatro reported in 2022 that the first seven were classified that way. Older women who lived alone were found dead at home, and the deaths were certified without suspicion.
At the trial, four forensic doctors who had certified deaths testified that they first recorded them as natural, Servimedia reported on November 26, 1991. One of them, José Manuel Venero, was named in the report. The doctors said it was the body of the sixth victim that first suggested violence.
By late 1987 reporters at the Santander newspaper El Diario Montañés had begun to look into the run of deaths, according to Infobae and Público. Cuatro named Paco Pérez Caballero as the journalist leading that reporting. Público wrote that the Cantabrian authorities at first denied that a serial killer was at work, and that public pressure forced the police to investigate. Cuatro reported that officials were reluctant to raise an alarm for fear of panic.
Police officers told the 1991 trial that their investigation began in August 1987, about five months after the first killing, Servimedia reported. Several people were looked at as suspects, and one was detained. The firmest lead came only after the last death.
Julia Paz Fernández died in April 1988 in Muriedas. Because her home was outside the city, the Guardia Civil handled the inquiry, according to Cantabria24Horas. Investigators learned that a bricklayer had recently fitted a reinforced door frame in her home, and also in her daughter's home. Servimedia's trial report said the decisive lead was that the defendant had worked for the last victim two months before her death.
The Guardia Civil learned the bricklayer's name, and that he had a criminal record and had been out on provisional release since November 1986. The National Police and the Guardia Civil then worked together on the case. Cantabria24Horas wrote that the head of the Santander police ordered him watched, and that the surveillance lasted about four weeks. On May 19, 1988, officers arrested Rodríguez Vega in Santander as he left home for work. Antonio Pallarés, the central government's delegate in Cantabria, announced it.
He confessed at the police station, according to Infobae and VICE España. Cantabria24Horas wrote that he first denied the killings and then admitted them when confronted with the evidence.
Police searched his home and found many small objects that had belonged to the women: jewelry, wedding rings, porcelain plates, religious images and other belongings, according to Infobae, which said he kept them as souvenirs. VICE España described them as trophies, arranged with care. Relatives of the dead women identified the objects when the police displayed them, some recognizing gifts they had given their mothers themselves, Cantabria24Horas wrote. Cuatro reported that a business card with his name had been found at one of the women's homes.
Before trial he was examined at length. Cantabria24Horas reported that a team at the Carabanchel psychiatric hospital in Madrid, led by Carlos Fernández Junquito, found a seriously disturbed personality but no mental illness. The forensic experts José Antonio García Andrade and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Fernández described him as a callous psychopath who knew right from wrong, felt no remorse and was likely to offend again. Another report put the conclusion in a sentence the court would echo: psychopathy was a way of being, not a mental illness, and so he was responsible for his acts.
The forensic doctors who testified at trial said the same in other words, according to Servimedia: he had a personality disorder affecting his emotions, but his will was not impaired, his intelligence was normal, and he was criminally responsible. They linked his conduct to emotional frustration directed at his mother and his mother-in-law.
The trial began before the Audiencia Provincial de Santander on November 25, 1991, according to Cantabria24Horas. The prosecutor was Lucio Valcarce. The defense lawyer, Santiago Pérez Obregón, argued that his client was mentally ill, which would have meant acquittal and committal to a psychiatric center.
Rodríguez Vega denied guilt. He said the women had died of natural causes, as the first certificates had said, according to Infobae and VICE España. Cantabria24Horas wrote that he described himself as "una persona normalita," a fairly normal person, and said he was the author of the acts but not guilty of them. He told the court he had never expected to be reported, because he believed the women had only fainted. The same article says he gave calm and detailed accounts of the deaths and admitted fifteen of the sixteen. Valcarce called him the vilest, most cowardly and most heartless person he had ever come across.
On the second day, November 26, nineteen relatives and friends of the dead women testified, Servimedia reported. The daughter of the first victim insulted him repeatedly from the witness stand and then lunged at him; court police held her back, and a member of the public was removed from the room. Another witness also tried to reach him. Four officers of the National Police testified about the investigation and the arrest. The defense was to call its witnesses, among them his sister, on the final day. Cantabria24Horas reported that his brothers said he deserved the death penalty.
On December 5, 1991, the presiding magistrate, Marcil Helguera, read the judgment of Section One of the Audiencia Provincial de Santander, Servimedia reported. The court convicted Rodríguez Vega of sixteen murders, each punished with 26 years, eight months and one day of reclusión mayor. It also convicted him of five counts of abusos deshonestos with the aggravating circumstance of contempt for the victims' age and home, four counts of abusos deshonestos without it, six counts of theft and two minor thefts. The agency gave the total as 440 years.
The court rejected the defense of mental illness. It found him a psychopath, not a psychotic, and fully responsible, with no mitigating circumstance. It described a severe psychopathy marked by coldness and an absence of feeling, pain, remorse or guilt, in a man of normal to high intelligence who knew the rules of society without feeling them. It said he was not suitable for treatment, wanted notoriety, and was highly dangerous to society. He was ordered to pay 8 million pesetas to the family of each woman, and the court confirmed an order declaring him insolvent.
Under the Penal Code then in force he could not serve more than 30 years, and Servimedia noted that with prison benefits he might be eligible for release after about 15. Valcarce said publicly that the Spanish system had no harsher penalty for such a killer, and that he would work to see that Rodríguez Vega received as few prison benefits and served as many years as possible. Pérez Obregón said he would study the judgment before deciding whether to appeal. Cantabria24Horas wrote that the sentence meant no release before 2008.
The defense appealed to the Tribunal Supremo, arguing that the evidence had been misread and that the killings should have been treated as homicide rather than murder. The Second Chamber rejected the appeal and upheld the sentence, Servimedia reported on April 30, 1993. Its findings, as the agency summarized them, were that he had a prior rape conviction, that he committed more than sixteen crimes in the women's homes, that the killings began in April 1987 while he was on conditional release and went on for about a year, and that he had a psychopathic personality rooted in a difficult childhood and a rejection of his family, especially his mother.
He spent the next fourteen years moving through Spanish prisons; Infobae counted ten of them, and Salamanca24horas wrote that he passed through more than ten. VICE España reported that he studied law, went on insisting that he was innocent, and quarreled with another prisoner, known as El Arropiero, over which of them had been crueler.
From his cell he wrote to the journalist Lucía Guirado, who, according to VICE España, worked for El Mundo and kept up a correspondence and conversations with him for two months. In those letters he called the killings revenge against his mother and wrote that he should have killed her instead, both VICE España and Infobae reported.
On October 22, 2002, he was moved from the prison at Dueñas to the prison at Topas, in the province of Salamanca, and placed in an isolation wing for inmates classed as most dangerous, according to La Gaceta de Salamanca. On October 24, 2002, during the morning exercise period, he was stabbed to death in the yard by other inmates. The date of October 24 is given by La Gaceta de Salamanca, the Diario de León and Público; VICE España and Infobae give October 26.
La Gaceta de Salamanca reported that guards saw the attack begin but could not intervene. Salamanca24horas wrote that the guards called for help but had no protective equipment and were held back by threats.
Three inmates were tried for the killing before a jury in Salamanca on December 14, 15 and 16, 2004, La Gaceta de Salamanca reported. Two of them, Enrique del Valle, known as El Zanahorio, and Daniel Rodríguez Obelleiro, received 13 years each for homicide, with the aggravating circumstance of abuse of superiority and a mitigating circumstance of mental disturbance. The third received five years as an accomplice. The defense had argued mental illness and claimed that the defendants had been manipulated by prison staff with union interests.
None of the three showed remorse. Del Valle told the court that by killing El Mataviejas he had done society a favor, and said he had already tried to kill him at Dueñas. Leaving an earlier hearing at a Salamanca investigating court, he shouted to television crews that he had killed El Mataviejas, the Diario de León reported. Salamanca24horas wrote in 2022 that del Valle was still in prison, due to serve his sentence until 2030, and that the other two men had since died.
No relative claimed the body, Infobae reported. Rodríguez Vega was buried in Salamanca on October 25, 2002, in an unmarked niche, according to Salamanca24horas. VICE España wrote that only the gravediggers were present; Infobae said a priest and two gravediggers.
The case has been retold on Spanish television, in the Criminalia program described by Cantabria24Horas, in Telemadrid's Tras la pista in 2017 and in Cuatro's Cuarto Milenio in 2022. Cantabria24Horas used the case to criticize the forensic doctors and judges who signed off on the deaths, and quoted the attitude it blamed for that failure: what did it matter, when it was only a few old women. In 2026 Silvia Cosio made a related argument in Público, writing that the women's age had made their deaths easier to overlook, both before and after the arrest.
Proven by final judgment: sixteen murders of elderly women in Santander and nearby in 1987 and 1988, with nine counts of abusos deshonestos, six thefts and two minor thefts (Audiencia Provincial de Santander, December 5, 1991; upheld by the Tribunal Supremo, 1993).
Points on which accounts differ:
The total sentence. Servimedia gave 440 years in 1991 and "more than 400" in 1993; Cuatro said 400 years.
The victims' ages. Servimedia's verdict report said 63 to 93; its Supreme Court report and most later accounts say 61 to 93; Telemadrid said 61 to 90.
The 1978 case. Twelve rapes in Infobae; five known cases admitted, in Cantabria24Horas. The sentence is given as 27 years in Infobae, VICE España and Cantabria24Horas, although Cantabria24Horas also mentions 17 years, and Cuatro says one year. He served about eight years by most accounts; Público says about five, with release in 1984.
The date of his death. October 24, 2002, in La Gaceta de Salamanca, the Diario de León and Público; October 26 in VICE España and Infobae.
The number of inmates. VICE España and Infobae name two; La Gaceta de Salamanca, the Diario de León and Salamanca24horas describe a third who took part, and three were convicted.
The total number of victims. The court convicted him of sixteen killings. Público wrote that some experts believe there were more; Cuatro's subheading spoke of nearly twenty. No other killing was charged.
December 3, 1957: José Antonio Rodríguez Vega is born in Santander.
1974: leaves the family home at 17 after a violent episode against his father.
October 1978: arrested in Santander for a series of sexual assaults.
1979: sentenced to a combined 27 years; most of the women later forgive him.
November 1986: released on provisional release.
April 1987: the first of the sixteen killings.
August 1987: police open an investigation into the deaths.
Late 1987: El Diario Montañés reporters begin publishing on the run of deaths.
April 1988: Julia Paz Fernández, 71, dies in Muriedas, the last of the sixteen.
May 19, 1988: arrested in Santander after about four weeks of surveillance; he confesses.
November 25, 1991: trial begins before the Audiencia Provincial de Santander.
November 26, 1991: nineteen relatives and friends of the women testify.
December 5, 1991: convicted of sixteen murders and other offenses; total sentence 440 years, with a 30-year limit.
April 1993: the Tribunal Supremo upholds the sentence (reported April 30).
October 22, 2002: moved from Dueñas prison to Topas prison, Salamanca.
October 24, 2002: killed by fellow inmates at Topas.
October 25, 2002: buried in Salamanca.
December 14 to 16, 2004: three inmates tried by jury in Salamanca; two receive 13 years each for homicide, one five years as an accomplice.