Manuel Delgado Villegas was born in Seville on January 25, 1943, and grew up in El Puerto de Santa Maria, where his father sold arrope, a grape syrup, which gave him his nickname. His mother died at his birth. He was illiterate, drifted between casual work, begging and prostitution, and served briefly in the Spanish Legion.
Between 1964 and 1971 he killed people in Spain and, by his own account, in France, Italy and Portugal: a woman he had been living with, an elderly shepherd, a French tourist, a homosexual man in Barcelona, others. The method varied and there was no evident pattern beyond opportunity. He was caught in January 1971 in El Puerto de Santa Maria after the body of his girlfriend, Antonia Rodriguez Relero, was found in a field.
He then confessed to forty-eight murders, describing them in a flat, cheerful manner over weeks, and Spanish police under the Franco regime publicised the total heavily. Seven were corroborated and a handful more were considered plausible. Several of the confessions were shown to be impossible.
He was examined and found to have serious cognitive impairment and an XYY chromosome pattern, which was then a fashionable explanation for violence and is no longer thought to be one. He was declared unfit to stand trial and held in psychiatric institutions. He was released in 1998 into the care of a sister and died of pneumonia in Madrid on February 3, 1998. He is often called Spain's most prolific serial killer on the strength of a confession that was mostly not true.