Antonia Rodriguez Relinque was 38, unmarried, and known on her street in El Puerto de Santa Maria as a woman with a slight intellectual disability who went about with a large, moustached drifter twelve years younger than herself. He had introduced her to his father as his girlfriend. When she disappeared in January 1971 the Cadiz criminal investigation brigade brought him to the Puerto police station for questioning, and on January 18 he was arrested. He denied everything until her body was found in a lonely spot on the edge of town called Pago Galvecito. Then he said he had strangled her with her own tights while they were having sex behind some bushes, because she had said something that insulted him as a man, and that he had gone back to the body on three nights afterward. Asked why, he told the inspector who had his confidence, Salvador Ortega, that dead or alive she was still his girlfriend. The Diario de Cadiz called him the Puerto strangler until the town asked the paper to stop. The name that stuck was the one his father had carried, El Arropiero, the arrope seller, after the grape syrup the old man hawked from town to town.
Manuel Delgado Villegas was born in Seville on January 25, 1943. His mother, 24, died giving birth to him, and because his father was always on the road he and his sister Joaquina were raised by their maternal grandmother in La Cirera, an Andalusian quarter of Mataro outside Barcelona. He went to school and never learned to read. From early adolescence he sold himself to men. In 1961 he enlisted in the Spanish Legion, where he learned the blow the legionaries called the golpe mortal, the edge of the hand driven into the larynx, and he came out of the army a vagrant, wandering the Mediterranean coast begging, stealing, and picking fights with prostitutes and homosexuals. Franco's vagrancy and social danger laws swept him up repeatedly, but his behavior in custody always got him sent to an asylum rather than a prison, and the asylums always let him go.
Over the following weeks he confessed to forty-eight killings in Spain, France and Italy. The Spanish police could only look into the twenty-two in their own country. Of those they came to regard him as the certain killer in seven, including two deaths that had been closed as accidents, and the investigating magistrate at El Puerto de Santa Maria, Conrado Gallardo Ros, spent the better part of two years flying him around the country with detectives to walk the scenes and act out what he had done. He was, the police noted, the first Spanish murderer to be taken to his crime scenes by air. The photographs from those trips show him smiling and embracing the officers, who called him Manolo and Manolito. The rest of the forty-eight were never established, and several fell apart on inspection.
The seven begin on January 21, 1964, on the beach at Llorac in the Garraf, south of Barcelona, where Adolfo Folch Muntaner, a 49-year-old cook, had gone to collect sand for scouring pots and fallen asleep against a wall. Delgado crept up and crushed his skull with a rock, then took his wallet and watch and complained afterward that there was almost nothing in one and the other was junk. On June 20, 1967, at Can Planas, a holiday settlement five kilometers from Ibiza town, he slipped into the room of Margaret Helene Therese Boudrie, a 21-year-old student from Lyon, smothered her with a pillow, stabbed the body in the back with a stiletto, raped it, and took the medal from her neck. Her traveling companion, an American named Jules Morton, spent more than a year in prison for her murder before he was cleared.
Venancio Hernandez Carrasco, 71, was working his vines on the bank of the Tajuna at Chinchon on July 20, 1968, when a young stranger asked him for food. He answered that a man that age should work if he wanted to eat. His body was pulled from the river by the San Galindo dam and written up as a drowning. Delgado later revised the story to say he had caught the old man molesting a girl; the police did not believe the second version. On April 5, 1969, in Barcelona, Ramon Estrada Saldrich, a furniture dealer who regularly paid him 300 pesetas, refused to pay the 1,000 Delgado had asked for. Delgado struck him in the neck, and when Estrada came round and began cursing him, tore the leg off an armchair, beat him with it, and strangled him until the neck broke. Anastasia Borrella Moreno, 68, was hit on the head with a brick in Mataro on November 23, 1969, pushed from a bridge, dragged into a tunnel and strangled. Francisco Marin Ramirez, 28, an electrician with the state railway and by Delgado's account a friend or a client, was punched twice in the head on December 3, 1970, after making an advance; a fisherman found him on December 12 floating in the Guadalete beneath the San Alejandro bridge at El Puerto de Santa Maria, twelve kilometers downstream from where he died. Antonia Rodriguez Relinque, six weeks later, was the last.
There was no pattern to the victims, which is why nobody connected them. They were men and women, old and young, Spanish and foreign, a cook, a student, a farmer, a furniture dealer, a pensioner, a railwayman, a neighbor. Delgado never planned a killing. A remark he took as an insult, a refusal, a sexual advance, or simply a sleeping man with a wallet was enough, and he killed with whatever was to hand or with his hands, raping women only once they were dead. Only the last two killings fell in the same town within weeks of each other, and it was that coincidence, not detective work, that ended it.
The count of seven is often given as eight. The extra name comes from a 1977 piece in the crime weekly El Caso proposing him as the killer of Natividad Romero Rodriguez, a prostitute found raped and strangled inside a large clay jar at a country house near Barajas in 1969; investigators at the time had suspected someone with military training, possibly an airman from the Torrejon base, and the police never tied the case to Delgado. Another name sometimes attached to him, Almudena Sanchez Rus, was killed in El Puerto de Santa Maria in 1972, when he had been in custody for a year. Among the confessions that went nowhere were a foreign woman strangled at Sant Feliu de Guixols, a woman stabbed in Alicante, a homosexual man garrotted with wire in Barcelona, and a client pushed off a cliff in the Garraf after remarking that it was a beautiful place to die. Hearing on a police radio that eighty bodies had been dug up in a Mexican garden, he asked to be let out for twenty-four hours, promising to come back, so that the other man would not beat his score.
Doctors who examined him reported a serious intellectual deficit and an XYY chromosome pattern, which in 1971 was being widely offered as a biological explanation for violent men and has since been discarded. He was never tried. He sat in custody without a defense lawyer for six and a half years, a record for preventive detention in Spain, until the Audiencia Nacional ruled him mentally incompetent in 1978 and ordered him held indefinitely in the penitentiary psychiatric hospital at Carabanchel in Madrid; he was later moved to Fontcalent, outside Alicante, where he gave his only interview in 1992. In 1996 he was transferred to an ordinary psychiatric hospital in Catalonia. He died of chronic obstructive lung disease, the product of a lifetime of smoking, at the Can Ruti hospital in Badalona on February 2, 1998, at 55. Spain still calls him its most prolific serial killer. The number that earns him the title is his own, and forty-one of the forty-eight were never shown to have happened.