MANUEL DELGADO VILLEGAS: THE SPANISH RECORD SERIAL KILLER

“I'm a very quiet man, I do not mess with anyone…”

That is how Manuel Delgado Villegas defined himself in 1992 during the only interview he gave in his life, relaxed and smoking one cigarette after another before TVE cameras (spanish public television), in the psychiatric penitentiary hospital of Fontcalent, Alicante. The murderer nicknamed "el Arropiero" holds to date the sad record of being the greatest serial killer in spanish criminal history, having been attributed to him 48 crimes committed during 7 years, of which the police investigated 22 and could prove his participation only in 7 of them.

His frightful curriculum would come to public light after the disappearance of two people between December 1970 and January 1971 in El Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz): Francisco Marín Ramírez, an introverted 24 years old cordovan young man, and Antonia Rodríguez Relinque, "la Toñi", a 38-year-old mentally retarded woman. Francisco's body appeared floating in the waters of Guadalete River on December 12th and it was determined that he was murdered by strangulation. On January 17th the disappearance of Antonia is reported. In the middle of a great popular commotion before these events the police focuses on Manuel Delgado Villegas, who was new in the city and had been dating her for a while, to the point that the neighbors speculated that they could be boyfriends. The Criminal Investigation Brigade (BIC) arrests and submits him to a harsh interrogation that immediately makes the policemen suspect, due to his behavior and contradictory confessions. Manuel fakes an epileptic seizure and presents a half movie ticket as weak alibi. After a couple of days and to the police officers’ amazement and disbelief, he ends up confessing with cockiness and coldness not only the authorship of the two crimes, but also arrogates to himself the murder of almost fifty people in the last seven years. At first his interrogators thought that he fantasized, but the amount of data and evidence that he provided led them to realize that they were in front of a real serial killer. The long subsequent investigation would prove 22 of those killings as plausible. Soon his sinister fame spread. El Diario de Cádiz, a local newspaper, called him at first “el Estrangulador del Puerto" (“the Harbor Strangler") but, before the complaints of the mayor for the bad reputation that that name could report to the city, he ended up being baptized as "el Arropiero". His final nickname was taken from his father’s profession, whom he helped in the sale of "arropía" or "arrope", a handmade fig candy. A sweet name for a character with such a bitter path.

"El Arropiero" had a really busy biography. He was supposedly born on January 25th, 1943, in the midst of spanish postwar misery, within the bosom of a very humble family in Seville. His mother Josefa, 24 years old, dies during his child birth and his violent father, dedicated to candies business while educating his children through beating, sends his progeny to live with his maternal grandmother in a neighborhood of andalusian emigrants in Mataró (Catalonia) because he did not have enough money to maintain it. His childhood was painful: in addition to the paternal aggressiveness and the poverty that surrounded him, he felt marginalized by his dyslexia and stuttering, which prevented him from learning to read and write and gave him the appearance of a mentally retarded.

At age 18, in 1961, he entered the Saharan Legion Third, where he learned the use of weapons and fighting, what will allow him to develop his famous death kick, the "tragantón", which consisted in hitting the neck of the victim with the edge of the hand, breaking the larynx and thus causing a rapid death by suffocation. In the army he is also introduced into the consumption of drugs and cannabis and ends up being expelled for not following military discipline. Again in civil life, he will lead a double life between Mataró, where he lived with his family, and Barcelona, ​​a city where he performs all kinds of jobs to survive (bricklayer, scrap dealer, confectioner or even selling his own blood more than 1.000 times) and at the same time he acts as a thug, male prostitute and pimp, well known in the red-light district for being well endowed and also due to his anaspermatism or absence of ejaculation, which allowed him to perform several sexual intercourses and maintain an erection for hours. He was arrested on several occasions because of the law popularly known as the "Gandula", the Vagrancy Act (Ley de Vagos y Maleantes), later called Social Danger Act, which did not sanction crimes but allowed the preventive detention of subjects in internment camps called Vagrants and Delinquent Reformatories, this way used by Franco regime as a repression tool against people without resources. Nevertheless Manuel never entered prison because he used to pretend epileptic seizures again and again, so the specialists placed him in psychiatric centers from which he left very soon.

From this point on he begins his murderous career, but it becomes difficult to reconstruct this period in a concrete way because he will live underground and in order to elaborate a coherent story it’s needful to go to his confessions, those of a murderer who blamed himself of so many crimes that would have outnumbered the history of the biggest serial killers in the world. Attending to this, "el Arropiero" would have started suffocating a foreigner in San Feliú de Guixols, stabbing another in Alicante, strangling a homosexual in Barcelona with a cable, putting in a vat the corpse of a woman in Valencia and murdering a man in Madrid. After that he began his journey abroad, mostly in France, where he entered clandestinely, even trying to enlist in the Foreign Legion. In the Gallic country was arrested several times but was always returned to Spain for lack of evidence, as the week he spent in detention in Narbonne, accused of murder. In 1962 he was in Marseille, underworld center of the time, where he carries out murders for the mafia throughout the country. In Paris he would meet a young girl member of a band of robbers, whom he machine-gunned because they did not admit him to the group, and he would also kill a girl for ratting out him. In Rome he maintained relations with his obese landlady and, when she discovered that he was cheating her with her niece, he killed both of them. He would continue with his actions in Monte Carlo, where he crushed with a stone the head of a rich woman who welcomed him in his luxurious mansion, and then stole her money and jewelry. The same thing would happen to a man who proposed him to have sexual intercourse in his house, ending up strangled with a cable. All of them would be crimes committed with total impunity due to "el Arropiero’s" ability to move quickly, the absence of apparent motive and the lack of a known link with the victims.

His first official crime was committed on a complete stranger on the beach of Llorac on January 21th, 1964, in the barcelonian town of Garraf. The victim, Adolfo Folch Muntaner, a chief cook, was sleeping on the breakwater to rest from his work when Manuel approached him, picked up a stone and smashed his head with it. Then he took his documentation and an old clock.

Another time he stow away to the Ibiza of the hippies, moving through port environments. Here he would commit his second proven crime, the murder of Margaret Helene Boudrie, a 21-year-old French student whose corpse was discovered on June 20th, 1967, in a farmhouse in Can Planas. Margaret had met the american Jules Norton in a nightclub the night of her death and he took her to the abandoned house. There the couple would consume LSD and various drugs while Manuel watches them hidden outside. When Margaret refuses to have sexual relations with him, Norton leaves the house in a bad mood, leaving the young woman nude and drugged in bed, the very moment that Manuel uses to enter, beat her, rape her and stab her in the back, and then to practice necrophilia with her dead body. Norton returns to the house because he had forgotten his glasses and wallet and runs away when he discovers the corpse, but he is seen by the neighbours. This led to the imprisonment of the young man, since in his first confession to the police he denied having been in the house. Norton spent more than a year in prison, being released for lack of evidence, which left the case unresolved until the final arrest of "the Arropiero" in 1971, a crime that the murderer remembered with special excitement during his confessions.

During a fleeting trip to Madrid, on July 20th, 1968, he liquidated the farmer Venancio Hernández Carrasco in Chinchón (third proven murder) with his legionary kick. Manuel approached him to ask for food and Venancio responded that he should look for a job, so he killed him with the "tragantón" and threw him into the Tajuña River, a crime that was considered as an accident until Villegas’ confession.

His fourth official crime caused a special shock in its time, the murder of industrialist Ramón Estrada Saldrich, a well-known figure of the catalonian bourgeoisie, owner of furniture emporiums Nomar and La Fábrica. His body was found on April 5th, 1969, at his shop on Diagonal Street in Barcelona. Estrada Saldrich was Manuel's regular client and, after having sex, the latter asked for a quantity of money that the former refused to give him. "El Arropiero" used his famous chop again and then strangled him. At the autopsy Manuel's DNA was found in a bandage inserted into Saldrich's anus but, due to the prestige of the family, it was decided not to air the matter.

On November 23th, 1969, he committed one of his most abhorrent crimes, the fifth recognized. Manuel approached a 68-year-old woman, Anastasia Borrella Moreno, and proposed her sexual intercourse. In the light of the indignation of the lady, he killed her with a brick and threw her body through a ten-meter-high trench. Then he dragged her into a tunnel and raped her while strangling her. He hid the body under a piece of plastic and went back to practicing necrophilia with the corpse for at least three nights in a row, until a group of children playing in the tunnel found her four days after the execrable murder.

His blood route would culminate in El Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz), where he stopped his wanderings and dedicated himself to helping his father with the candies sale. Here he would commit his last two proven crimes before his final arrest. The sixth took place on December 3th, 1970, and the victim was Francisco Marín Ramírez, a young homosexual student, myopic and introverted, with whom Manuel had become friend. After a motorcycle ride he dealt his death blow because, according to Manuel, he had tried to caress him. Francisco recovered a little but, when restarting his insinuations, Manuel strangled him and finally threw him into the river, looking to act again an accidental death. The young man lived in the same street as his next victim, Antonia Rodríguez Relinque, "la Toñi", a beautiful but oligophrenic woman who was known for her sexual promiscuity, maintaining relations with the truckers who were passing through the area. Antonia and Manuel soon began to get together, so he comes to consider her as his girlfriend. Their tortuous sexual relations were full of violence, since, apparently, "la Toñi" enjoyed to be pounded. One day things got out of hand. They were in an open field and Antonia asked Manuel to perform oral sex with her, what disgusted him. She insulted him and told him that he was not a man and he started to beat her. The discussion heated up and Manuel ended up it strangulating her with her tights. The next few nights he went back to frequenting her corpse. As he confessed to the police, "I was with Toñi again on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and would have returned today if you do not catch me."

After his detention and subsequent confession, on February 24th, 1971, he was transferred to the General Directorate for Security of Madrid, thus beginning his odyssey of prisons, psychiatrists and bureaucracy. Manuel Delgado Villegas had the record of preventive arrest without a defense lawyer, 6 and a half years, since he was diagnosed with a mental illness and in its time the detainees in his state were not judged, but were admitted directly to a specialized center. This way he avoided a more than possible death sentence by garrotting. His case, that of the most prolific murderer in spanish criminal history, which had shaken the society of the time and overwhelmed the authorities, suffered many of these errors, as if it were an uncomfortable matter that no one wanted to deal with. It lacked private prosecutions, there were few witnesses, he spent three years in prison completely forgotten and his file was lost in 1973. Finally, in 1977, the public prosecutor Alejandro del Toro finds his summary in Barcelona and promotes a new trial. The special legal status of "el Arropiero", locked up without trial, was a scandal that could remove the foundations of the new democracy, so a tacit agreement was reached between judges, police and psychiatrists, who at first did not know how to find a proper solution. In the end, the National Court issued a free dismissal order in 1978 that shelved the case and decreed its permanent confinement in a specialized medical center on June 20th.

His exterminator history finally materialized in 7 proven deaths, 14 investigated and 26 confessed. The majority were left unproven, partly because of the complexity involved in the need for international police collaboration in order to clarify many of them and the limited scientific means of the time. In addition to his judicial and criminal records, "El Arropiero" has several achievements to add to his macabre record. Due to the characteristics of his confessions, he was a pioneer prisoner in traveling by plane to carry out reconstruction trips throughout the country with the police to detail the scenarios and circumstances of his crimes. Thus he accompanied the team led by Salvador Ortega Mallén in 1971, "el Patillas", inspector of the Criminal Investigation Brigade, and Conrado Gallego, judge of Cádiz, who were amazed by the accuracy with which Manuel remembered all the details. During the whole trip reigned within the group an atmosphere of surprising and spontaneous fellowship, in which Manuel allowed himself to joke with the officers. One of them told him once that the radio had spoken about a Mexican who had killed more people than him. Manuel stayed thoughtful, went to the chief inspector and whispered him: "Boss, leave me free 24 hours, please, so that guy doesn’t beat me."

He was also the first criminal in Spain to be cataloged as carrier of the XYY chromosome, a sexual trisomy because of which the subject is endowed with an additional Y chromosome, thus reaching a total of 47, one more than normal people. This anomaly, shared by criminals like "the Boston Strangler", was known by the medicine in its time as the "Lombroso chromosome" or "criminal chromosome", following the italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s theories, who considered that the murderous impulses were innate. The current studies have refuted their conclusions, accepting that such a disorder can lead to the development of a greater aggressiveness that does not need to materialize in homicidal impulses. His case caught the attention of numerous psychiatrists and specialists, who visit and analyze him frequently in his place of internment.

"The Death Vagabond", another of his nicknames, would spend more than 20 years in different psychiatric and penitentiary institutions. From 1978 until the dismantling of this very center he was interned in the psychiatric hospital of Carabanchel (Madrid), then the only center for mental patients accused of homicide, where he lives completely isolated and still difficult to be controlled. Here he will try to strangle a young german man, condemned because of the ritual crime of Tenerife, and to rape a social worker. During his long imprisonment he will be submitted to all kinds of therapies and treatments, such as electroshocks, straitjackets, chains and pills, which will degrade him physically and mentally until they cause premature aging aggravated by the compulsive consumption of tobacco. Thus his physical appearance will change to resemble that of an old man, with gray hair and a beard that earned him the nickname "Robinson Crusoe". In Carabanchel he also became friend with José Antonio Rodríguez Vega, "the Old Women Killer", with whom he boasted of his criminal achievements.

In 1988 he moved to Fontcalent (Alicante) where his only contact with the outside world will be the visits from his sister Joaquina twice a year. With the reform of the spanish penal code, the National Court declared the sentence of 1978 incompatible with the system of guarantees of fundamental rights of the constitution, after a complex bureaucratic procedure initiated by the lawyer Rodríguez Menéndez. The forensic doctors and psychiatrists declare him unfit to be judged due to having his mental faculties disturbed. According to the spanish jurisdiction, a mental patient could not be imposed a penalty, but a security measure, such as internment, indeterminate in time depending on the evolution of his illness, which doctors determine but must be ratified by a judge. In this way the open prison is applied to him and he is practically released in 1998, when he is transferred to a mental hospital in Santa Coloma de Gramanet, a center without bars and from which he could come outside, so he will wander between Barcelona and Mataró, where his sister lived, until he died two months later because of a heart failure due to respiratory insufficiency, as a result of a lung disease, at age 55, on February 2th, 1998, at the Can Ruti hospital in Badalona. "El Arropiero" left this life unnoticed, still with many unsolved murders, some of which make many people still remain in prison, and with the doubt of whether in that brief period of freedom he had murdered again or not.

Manuel Delgado Villegas was a pure killer. Maybe his first murders were the result of need, in order to get money, food or shelter, but soon he began to kill by simple vanity, to increase his number of victims. ""El Arropiero" was a murderer who gathered an incredible number of peculiarities. He was a person who killed for sexual impulses, for stealing, because someone had looked at him badly ... He had violent impulses dominated by different aspects. All these characteristics made him a very special criminal because most murderers always kill on the basis of the same pattern or motive. In addition, he had the capacity to kill with impressive degrees of violence, or to do it in an extremely subtle way" explained Juan Ignacio Blanco, former editor of El Caso, spanish crime journal. An unsystematic executor who acted many times impulsively and randomly, what made it very difficult to track him down. His personality was that of an authentic psychopath: narcissistic, egocentric and megalomaniac, with a tendency to invent and lie that made that his statements were often contradictory. With a corpulent and athletic complexion, his eyes were cold blue and his look chameleonic: his most famous photos show him with a Cantinflas style mustache but he would end his days with a beard that gave him the appearance of a tramp. His attitude used to be closed and distant, although those who knew him, including the police officers who guarded him during the reconstruction trip, considered him a very funny person. Manuel had a long list of pathologies: antisocial personality disorder, epilepsy, paranoid schizophrenia, alcoholism, drug addiction, megalomaniacal delirium, temporal-spatial disorientation, strong tendency to autism and isolation from the outside world... Not to mention his paraphilias, being the more recurrent that of his orientation for necrophilia. He showed no regrets for his crimes and described them without expressing any emotion, even bragging about them. His first public defense lawyer, Juan Antonio Roqueta Quadras-Bordes, said that "if he were released, four or five corpses would soon appear, within a few hours" adding that he could go from absolute calm to killing if someone denies him a cigarette. In the interview he gave to television in Fontcalent, "el Arropiero" concluded with these words: "Everything we are living is a dream, a dream above a nightmare, and when that dream is over we will be ashes".