Jose Antonio Rodriguez Vega was born in Santander on March 20, 1957. He had a conviction for attempted rape from 1978 and worked as a handyman.
Between August 1987 and April 1988 he killed at least sixteen women in Santander, all of them between sixty-one and ninety-three. He knocked at doors offering to repair or insulate windows, which in that city in winter was a welcome offer from a polite young man, and once inside he raped and suffocated them. He then arranged the scenes so that the deaths would look natural, which for elderly women living alone they largely did. Several were certified as natural causes and buried without question.
He was caught because he kept things. In April 1988 a relative of one victim recognised an ornament in his flat. Police searched it and found a museum of small objects taken from the dead: watches, rings, ornaments, photographs, and a notebook. He confessed to sixteen and the exhumations followed.
He was convicted in 1991 and sentenced to 440 years, which under Spanish law meant a maximum of thirty. The Spanish press called him El Mataviejas. He was stabbed to death by two fellow inmates at the Topas prison in Salamanca on August 25, 2002.