You could probably find several sources of information in English about the general history of Spain. But what you are going to find in the following pages is something that is not so easy to find, or to hear somebody talking about. This is the darkest side of the history of Spain, a side which most people would prefer to forget: the criminal history, that of the most brutal and devilish psychopath murderers.
We'll start in the 19th century, when the first psychiatrists tried to analize men who seemed to have come from the most horrific medieval legends. And we will finish in the present day, where, despite all the advances in forensic science and psychology, nothing can be done to prevent these human predators from walking among us from time to time, doing their will.
During this journey throug the most sadistic minds of Spain, you will find out about killers like Manuel Delgado Villegas, El Arropiero, a necrophilic wanderer who probably killed 48 people; or Jose Antonio Rodríguez Vega, a highly intelligent criminal who managed to murder at least 16 old woman in just a year; or about Enriqueta Martí Ripoll, a witch who could have killed more than 25 children in the early 20th century.
So, before you start, take a deep breath and be prepared, because this is the Spanish history of madness and death.
Manuel Blanco Romasanta, born in 1810 in the Spanish Kingdom of Galicia, is the first known serial killer in Spain. He suposedly killed 13 people between 1846 and 1852, and one of the details which made his crimes famous all around the country and far away, was that he claimed before the justice that he was transformed into a werewolf during the murders, because of a curse he carried for 13 years and which finished on the last Saint Peter's day, when he was cured and so could not make a demonstration for the tribunal.
He assured an astonished audience that he had met two other werewolves during his first transformation (he even gave their names, and he said that they were from Valencia, a Spanish city) and that he killed his victims with the help of these new friends, just to eat because they were hungry. He also told them that he remembered all that he did when he was a wolf, but that he was being controlled by the animal instinct and could do nothing to prevent the killings.
The truth is that his victims were caught in Blanco Romasanta's deadly trap in a way which was very different from an instinctive animal attack, so the "werewolf" had in fact an intelligent and very human plan to kill with impunity.
Blanco Romasanta was a peddler, who used to travel along the paths of the northwest of the peninsula: he knew them like the back of his hand, every single turn. When he was accused of killing a sheriff in Leon because he wanted to seize Romasanta's business, Manuel fled to the Galician village of Rebordechao, where he lived and established a known friendship with the women of the village, a friendship that earned him the reputation of being effeminate. There's still now a belief that Romasanta was sexually ambiguous, and he even held jobs during his life that only were done by women at that time.
Taking advantadge of the trust a woman called Manuela Blanco (almost the same name as his) had in him, he convinced her to follow him to Santander, where he promised that she would work as a servant for a priest. Spanish priests used to be rich at that time, and it was a very desirable job for Manuela at that moment.
So, Manuela Blanco and her 6 year old daughter Petra followed Romasanta to their destiny, which wasn't a priest's house, but death. Deep in his well-known forest, Manuel killed Manuela and Petra, and stole their clothes and belongings to sell them.
When he went back to Rebordechao, he told everybody that Manuela Blanco was very happy with her new job. He used the same trick with Manuela's sister Benita and with two other women: all of them died with their sons and daughters. Nine people in all, four women, five children. After a time surrounded with suspicion, Romasanta even falsified letters from his victims, telling their relatives and friends that they were very happy.
One day, two siblings of Manuela Blanco met a woman wearing their sister's clothes. The woman told them that Romasanta sold them to her, and that's the way Manuel Blanco Romasanta was accused of those nine deaths, and the justice of Galicia started his manhunt.
Romasanta leftGalicia with a false passport and identity, and he went to Toledo. Then he lived there until two day laborers from Galicia recognized him and reported it to the mayor of the city. Manuel Blanco Romasanta was captured and his unusual trial, in which he claimed to be a werewolf, started.
He acknowledged that he had committed (in the form of a werewolf) the murders of 13 people, including the 9 Rebordechao inhabitants. He guided the authorities to the places where the murders had happened, and, in some of them, bones and remains of the victims were found.
The main question at Romasanta's trial was the following: was he a madman or a liar? Despite the fact that several people believed that Romasanta was a real werewolf, that wasn't the opinion of the judge, nor the general opinion among the competent authorities and the people related to the case.
The lawyer defending Romasanta mantained that he was just a madman, and not a killer, claiming that the corpses had real wolf bites, so they must have been killed by animals. This information encouraged the believers of the real werewolf theory. Probably, the bite marks were a testimony of wild animals eating the corpses that the killer had left.
On the other hand, the doctors who talked with Manuel to officially determine if he was mad or not, described the criminal as an intelligent and completely sane man, without mental or physical disorders, who, in spite of the fact that he knew perfectly the difference between right and wrong, enjoyed commiting evil acts, and had no human feelings or sensibility. This is a clear description of a typical psycopath, made at an age when the definition of psycopathy as we know it today didn't exist.
Finally, Manuel Blanco Romasanta was considered mentally stable and declared completely guilty, and he was condemned to the death penalty at the "garrote vil", the instrument used in Spain at that time for the execution of criminals. But, before his execution, queen Isabel II of Spain in person decided to change the verdict, as a result of a letter from a famous French hypnotist that followed the trial through the press (the case was internationally famous) and wanted to investigate Romasanta in person. The insistence of Romasanta's lawyer helped the queen to take that decision too.
So Blanco Romasanta was sentenced to life imprisonment by the queen. Probably he died in prison, but there's no document about his death, and there are doubts about how or where he died. According to José Ferro, anthropologist of the University of Santiago, Manuel Blanco Romasanta died in prison, dressed as a woman, and showing his face to the visitors in exchange of a few coins.
The documents of the case are still found in the Historical Archive of the Kingdom of Galicia, where they figure as "Cause 1788, of the Werewolf".
Years before Jack the Ripper, in Spain we had our own prostitute killer and women ripper. His name was Juan Díaz de Garayo y Ruiz de Argandoña, but he's more commonly known as the Sacamantecas of Vitoria.
The old Spanish word "sacamantecas" (literally, "lard extractor") is used to define those who kill people to extract the human lard of the corpses, a highly valued material in the old days, specially that of children and young women, because its then alleged to have healing properties. As a curiosity, one of the rumors around Romasanta, the killer in the previous chapter, was that he was a sacamantecas who used to sell the lard of the corpses in Portugal, but this was never proved. Anyway, the killer who bore the name Sacamantecas with the greatest fame was Garayo, and more than that, his brutal story transformed him into a legend, a ficticious and monstruous creature used by grannies to scare children: the Sacamantecas could come for them if they did not eat their food, or go home on time.
Anyhow, curiously the most popular sacamantecas wasn't a sacamantecas at all, just an extremely violent sexual criminal, who used to get excitement from the rape and murder of his unfortunate victims. For almost ten years (from April 1870 to September 1879), his six horrific crimes terrified the population, until he was captured and publicly executed on the garrote vil, reassuring a large crowd who were able to see how the Sacamantecas finally died.
Juan de Garayo was born in 1821 in Álava, and lived there as a typical, illiterate farmer until he started with his crimes, at the age of 49. Of ugly and harsh features, with long arms and big hands, he was compared sometimes to a Neanderthal. He was a happy man when living with his first wife, a widow who married him because she needed help to work on her estate, but who, apparently, was a good and loving wife for him. They had three healthy children together (and another two who died).
On 1863, after thirteen years of marriage, Garayo's wife died of natural causes. A short time after that, he married a second woman, who turned out to be a violent and disgusting woman, so much so that Garayo's sons left their father's house because her. This second wife was not only a bad wife, but a bad lover to Garayo: there were sexual problems between them. That was a constant feature in the following marriages of Garayo, another two that he had with alcoholic and disgraceful women who spent the farmer's money on drink. Juan de Garayo tended to to become a widower easily, and there are people who think that he was related to his wives deaths, but there's no proof of that.
The sexual relations with his wives is important because, when confessing, he claimed that he had commited his crimes because he needed to maintain in that way the sexual relations that his wives denied him. It's known that Garayo's mood changed since he lived with his second wife: he became unsociable and selfish, even with his sons. So, it's a common thought that these continuous unhappy marriages significantly contributed to the composition his criminal personality.
He killed his first victim in 1870, when he was married to his second wife. A woman known as the "valdegoviesa" was bound to die the April 2 of that year. With her husband in jail, she had no other way to make a living than to prostitute herself. And was when working as a prostitute on an old road when she met her killer. Juan de Garayo asked her price, but did not accept the one she told him: he wanted to pay less. They had a heated argument because this, which finished with Garayo savagely strangling her until almost unconsciousness with his big hands, then raping her, an then drowning her in a nearby stream.
Almost a year later, in March 1871, when his first murder had almost been forgotten, he did it again with another prostitute, all in the same way, even including the argument about the money, probably caused on purpose by the killer to repeat the situation. As he did the previous time, when he finished, he went back home and continued with his daily life.
On August 21, 1872, he casually met on a road a teenage girl, beautiful and well dressed, from a wealthy family, who was on her way to Vitoria. Driven by the attraction he felt for the young girl, and by his violent desires and killer impulses, he raped and strangled her without saying a word before.
On August 29, eight days later, he went with a prostitute to a private place, and then, like the first two times, he started an argument about the money. Then he strangled and raped the unconscious woman, but this time something was different: he finally killed her with an improvised sharp weapon, a needle the woman had in her hair, that Garayo plunged into her heart. Apparently, he liked it, because on his two next murders, the last ones, he took and used a knife.
But before these two last crimes, the most brutal of them, the Sacamantecas had four failed attempts, and he could not finally kill again until 1879.
On 1873, he started to argue about money with a prostitute near the Polvorin, the military barracks near his village and the roads on which he usually killed. When Garayo attacked the woman, she shouted and attracted the attention of some soldiers of the barracks, who arrived on the scene just when the killer fled.
The next failed attempt occurred the next year, when he abruptly tried to rape an old woman who was begging for money. Some women saw them and helped to save the beggar, then Garayo apparently calmed down.
The third failed attempt finished with his bones in prison for a short time. On November 1, 1878, he went to the mill of Las Trianas, when the miller, a woman he knew, was working alone. He asked her about the men, and the woman told him that they were not there. Then, the miller went home, and the Sacamantecas followed her. She noticed him behind her just in time to fight back when he tried to rape her, enough to run away shouting for help. Garayo was condemned to two months in jail, which he served without attracting anyone's attention more than was necessary.
When released from prison he continued with his farmer's life, until August, 1879, when he attacked another old woman and beggar on the road of Castilla. When he knocked her down to try to rape her, she kicked him fast on his crotch, causing him enough pain to give her time to run away. She went to her house in Vitoria, and Garayo followed her, to find out where she lived, but then returned home. Then, he told everything to his wife (his fourth and last one) and convinced her to go to talk with the old woman, and to give her 20 pesetas (the former Spanish currency) in order not to report the incident. Their plan worked, and Juan de Garayo avoided prison this time.
Then, the crimes which put the Sacamantecas on the lips of all the Spanish happened.
On September 7, 1879, he met, while walking along a road, Maria Dolores Cortázar, a young and beautiful woman, not a prostitute, with whom he started a conversation and started to walk. They even went to have lunch together at a place called El Grillo, where several people saw them together (which would be important to the arrest of the Sacamantecas, later). After lunch they kept walking, and then Juan Díaz de Garayo asked her for sex, offering money in exchange. She refused the offer, and then the Sacamantecas showed her his knife, and forced her to follow him into the woods. Then he undressed her as he usually did, and tried to rape her, but she fought back strongly, and he decided to plunge the knife several times into her chest. Then, Garayo raped her while she was bleeding to death, and probably he continued doing so when she had died.
Maybe this murder didn't completely satisfy the long time repressed thirst for violent sex and death of the Sacamantecas, or maybe he enjoyed it so much that he wanted to repeat it soon. The thing is, his next and last crime took place the next day.
On the evening of that September 8, a 52 years old woman called Manuela Audícana was going back to her village with some food from the fair of Vitoria, when she met on the road the carrier of her death, Juan Díaz de Garayo. He talked with her for a while, until it started to rain and they had to take shelter under a big tree, a perfect crime scene for the killer. Then he asked her for sex, and, when she refused, he asked her for money, thinking that she should have some when coming from the fair, but she told him that she had nothing. Then, he violently grabbed the apron she was wearing, and strangled her with it. When she fell unconscious, he undressed her and searched in her clothes for money, and, when he found nothing, he raped her, stabbed her body several times, and then opened her abdomen with his knife and extracted her guts and one of her kidneys with his own hands. If there is one crime for which we can call Juan Díaz de Garayo a true Sacamantecas, it's this one. The Sacamantecas left the place while eating the food that Manuela Audícana had been carrying.
Knowing that these last two crimes were going to put the autorithies on his trail, he went to the village of Alegría, where he got a job as a day laborer for a short time. His wife didn't miss him, because it was usual for her husband to be away for several days. Curiously, when working there, and at a moment when everyone was talking about the Sacamantecas, because his recent crimes, the daughter of the landlord who employed Díaz de Garayo said one day, referring to him: "What an ugly servant you have, father. He looks like the Sacamantecas!" That innocent girl didn't know how close to the truth she was.
It was Fernández de Pinedo, sheriff of Vitoria, who finally captured the Sacamantecas. In spite of the rudimentary methods of the moment, he made an effective investigation which led him to Díaz de Garayo. Asking about the people seen with the last two victims (the only ones he knew at that moment that the Sacamantecas had killed), he discovered that Maria Dolores Cortázar was eating with Garayo at El Grillo the day she died, and they were seen together walking along the roads too, the same day. So, Pinedo checked Juan Díaz de Garayo's record, and he found out about the incident with the miller, so he thought that he was looking for the right man. Then, he went to Garayo's house, where he found the killer's wife, who told him that her husband was not at home. Then, by the way of an apparently casual conversation, he managed to coax the truth out of her about the episode with the old woman and the 20 pesetas. This was the final clue that de Pinedo needed, but he didn't know where his man was.
Meanwhile, the Sacamantecas decided that things should be cooling down after his crimes, and decided to go home to talk with his wife and get some clothes. When walking through Vitoria he came across Fernández de Pinedo, who recognized and arrested the Sacamantecas, who finished up being thoroughly interrogated for days. Finally, Juan de Garayo confessed all his crimes.
During his trial, there was a battle between the conventional doctors and the psychiatrists. The psychiatrists of the moment were believers of the then current theories of Lombordo about criminals, which said that a killer could be identified before commiting any crime through his physical appearance. The physique of Garayo, specifically characteristics such as the shape of his skull or his big arms and hands, made these psychiatrists believe that the Sacamantecas was a natural born violent criminal, moved to kill because of his nature, driven by an instinct greater his passions, feelings or thoughts. So, they believed that Garayo should be put into a psychiatric center.
The justice was reluctant to put the medical opinion about Garayo into the psychiatrists' hands, believing that to assign traditional doctors for this task was a better choice (psychiatry was a completely new field at that moment). These doctors determined, against the psychiatrists' opinion, that Juan de Garayo had no mental problems, and that he knew at every moment what he was doing. This theory was the one which looked better in the justice's view, counting on the killer's testimony, who said that he raped the girls to satisfy his sexual needs and that he killed them in order not to be reported, so he had reasons and he thought about them. Probably, in his case, the truth is that he got excitement with violence and with the death of his victims, but that's the way the people of the moment officially understood his motivations. So, he was condemned to death. Curiously, the decision of the tribunal regarding if he was a madman or not, was similar to the actual official consideration of psychopaths in legal terms (completely imputable crimes, like any other person).
The execution of the Sacamantecas of Vitoria was a massive public event, which lots of people attended to see the monster's death. The most relevant executioner of Spain at that moment, Gregorio Mayoral, was called, and he travelled from Burgos exclusively to carry out the execution of Juan de Garayo. His corpse was left on the garrote vil for hours, so anyone could approach him and confirm that he was dead.
Francisco Leona was a ruthless faith healer who directed the kidnapping and brutal murder of an innocent 7 year old boy called Bernardo, in 1910. This terrifying crime brought back the legend of the Sacamantecas, and it could be the origin of another Spanish Boogieman, "El Hombre del Saco" (The Man with the Sack, who kidnaps children).
It happened in a village near Almería, called Gádor. Francisco Ortega, the "moruno", was then a 55 year old man obsessed with his health, who suffered from tuberculosis, a deadly and very typical disease at that moment. He sought a solution from a faith healer, a woman called Agustina Rodríguez, who, knowing that she wasn't capable of healing his patient, put him in contact with Francisco Leona.
Leona was a 75 year old man closely related to a tyrant family who ruled Gádor, so he was used to doing what he wanted and to bullying everyone with impunity since he had been a child. He was working as a barber and healer when Agustina Rodríguez put him in contact with the "moruno". It was an old and primitive common thought that the blood of children had healing properties, as did their lard. So, Leona took advantage of this, thinking that the more grotesque and hard to find the remedy was, the more his patient would be determined to pay. Claiming that his life was more important than God, Francisco Ortega accepted the quack doctor's offer.
The family of Agustina Rodríguez was involved in the plan too, and his son, Julio Hernández "el tonto" (the dumb one) agreed to go with Leona and help with the kidnapping and carrying of the child. When they found Bernardo, who was alone, separated from his friends, Leona jumped on him and put him to sleep with a handkerchief soaked in chloroform. Then, Hernández carried the child to a shed they had arranged for the ritual, where Agustina and the "moruno" were waiting.
The patient, according to the healer's instructions, had to drink the blood just when it was extracted from the child's body. Leona cut the child's armpit with a knife, and Agustina took the blood into a glass. She added sugar to the blood and then Francisco Ortega drank it.
Leona sent Ortega home to wait for the second part of the remedy. Then, with the help of Julio Hernández again, he took the child through the fields to the place where they were going to hide his corpse. Then, they killed the boy hitting his head with stones several times, and then open his stomach and extracted the guts. Leona, being a true Sacamantecas, took the child's lard and made cataplasms with it, which later would be put over Francisco Ortega's chest, as a part of the fake healing.
Bernardo's parents noticed his absence soon, and started a search for him, on their own at first, and with the help of the Civil Guard later. On the next day, Julio Hernández told the Civil Guard that he had found Bernardo's corpse. He did it out of vengeance against his mother and Francisco Leona, because they didn't pay him the 50 pesetas they had promised for helping with their plan. So, he wanted to put the Civil Guard on Leona's trail.
Several people suspected Leona, and the Civil Guard arrested the old tyrant soon. He and "el tonto" were interrogated, and they accused each other several times, but finally both of them confessed. Francisco Leona, Agustina Rodríguez, and Julio Hernández were condemned to death. Julio Hernández's penalty was finally revoked because of his psychiatric problems, and Leona died in prison before his visit to the garrote vil.
While Francisco Leona was dying in prison in Gadós, in Barcelona another person was killing children to extract their blood and lard for commercial purposes, and maybe with personal sadism. A woman, a self proclamed witch, also called a vampire, and one of the most important serial killers in Spanish criminal history.
Between 1908 and 1912, Enriqueta Martí Ripoll kidnapped, prostituted and killed countless children. There are five proven cases of murdered children, and two children and a baby known to have disappeared, all of them attributed to Martí; but the bones, scalps, blood and ointments made with organic substances that were found in Enriqueta Martí's houses, indicate many more murdered children, probably more than twenty five.
She used to work as a maid for a wealthy family, until she noticed, in her words, that her lords were even more depraved than she was. Consequently, she started to work as an upper class prostitute to take advantage of the depravity of these rich people. When she had more money, she started to run a brothel for pedophiles, where wealthy men could lie with poor children.
But after that, she went much further away. Considering herself a witch, and the heiress to old black magic treatises, she started to do "witch jobs" for the rich people. Soon, she merged her two business into a terrifying and continuous orgy of death and blood. As explained in previous chapters, the blood and lard of the children were considered, in the old days, to have healing properties. With her knowledge about dark and primitive healing and magic, she started to make potions and ointments with the organic substances she extracted from children who she kidnapped and killed, and to let some rich people affected by tuberculosis drink blood directly from living children, as a supposed healing.
She herself used to drink children's blood frequently, thinking that it stopped the ageing process, and that it gave her superhuman sexual power and passion, which she frequently unleashed on the several lovers who used to visit her. It's believed that Enriqueta Martí was an hematophile, a sexual deviation consisting of sexual stimulation through blood. Counting on the fact that there was no trace of flesh among the corpses and human remains found in Martí's properties, it can be supposed that she practised cannibalism too, maybe even that somebody paid her to eat those children's bodies.
Enriqueta Martí accumulated several houses around all the city during the progress of her criminal and lucrative career, and moved herself from one place to another from time to time: this was probably to escape the law, as she was a wanted criminal, having been accused of kidnapping a small girl in 1910. When captured in 1912, she had been living for some time in her flat of an apartment building, in Ponent Street, in the center of Barcelona. There, she had living children in terrible conditions, waiting for their turn to be prostituted or killed, when somebody paid Enriqueta for them.
During the day, Enriqueta used to dress as a poor woman, but it was no more than a disguise. In her house, hidden with the corpses of children, she had some of the most expensive and beautiful clothes anybody could buy, which could make any woman of the moment look like an authentic upper class person. Despite this, when the sun was up in the sky, she used to go outside dressed as a beggar, and to haunt small children in the poor neighborhoods. She studied them and selected the most unattended, and then attacked. She used to grab a child and hide him or her under her big cape or skirt, and then to disappear into the shadows. Sometimes, eye witnesses claimed to have seen a fattish woman all dressed in black kidnapping the children, but there were lots of kidnappings before Enriqueta could be caught. The poor families of Barcelona were terrified of the kidnapper of children.
Enriqueta's disguise and area of action confused the police, who searched for her in the poor neighborhoods and the underground, while the kidnapper had her victims confined to her flat in the center of the city.
Meanwhile, each night, when the sun fell, Enriqueta transformed her appearance into that of a rich woman. Then she left her home, well-dressed and made-up, just in time to meet luxury cars which picked her up, and took her to an unknown destination: probably, any place where she could meet wealthy people, and do business with them; or maybe to some unknown and atrocious orgy, probably directed by herself.
The last child that she kidnapped was a little girl called Teresa Guitart, for whom the police, fed up with having a kidnapper acting freely in their town for years, carried out an incredible but useless deployment through Barcelona's underworld. Meanwhile, a neighbor of Enriqueta, a woman called Claudina Elías, saw one day, through Martí's window, the face of a little girl screaming in terror. Then, as if she had been grabbed by somebody behind her, the child dissapeared into the shadows.
A scared Elías thought that maybe that girl was Teresita, the child every newspaper was talking about, but she didn't want to be hasty. During the following days, Claudina attentively listened through the walls of the building, and she clearly heard children's cries coming from Martí's flat.
Facing up to the unbelievable fact that her neighbor could be the kidnapper of children who had plunged Barcelona into horror, and showing great bravery, Claudina Elías called at Enriqueta Martí's door to gather the definitive proof of what she suspected. When the woman opened, Elías told her that she had heard her daughter crying a lot over the previoust days. She asked if the child was ill and offered her help. Martí suddenly told Claudina that she had no children, and closed the door in her face.
Now completely sure that she had just talked with the famous kidnapper of children, she ran outside and searched for a policeman, who was a friend of hers, called José Arens and who was with another two agents when he met Claudina Elías that day. All of them went to Martí's flat, and Arens knocked at the door. He told her that he was making a public health inspection, and Enriqueta tried to close the door, but the agent acted firmly and resolutely making use of his authority, and he practically broke his way into the flat. Inside, he found a filthy, insanitary house in total darkness, in which a little, cropped girl was crying. She was Teresa Guitart. In another room, he found another little girl, sick and in terrible conditions, who had been there for more time than Teresa.
Soon, Enriqueta Martí was arrested, and the mayor of Barcelona presided at a public act in which the rescued children were shown. Teresa's parents could not believe their luck. Angelina, the other girl, wasn't identified and their parents could not be found.
Teresa Guitart declared that when inside Martí's house of horrors, she saw the woman pretending to give her breast to a baby who later dissapeared, and that she saw a dead child on a bed.
All Enriqueta's houses were searched. In a wardrobe in the flat on the Ponent street, the police found children's and babies' clothes covered in blood, and a recently used large knife with blood too. In a secret hollow in the wall, they found 30 bones of at least 12 small children, clothes covered in blood, and Enriqueta's expensive dresses, which she used to wear at night. In a flat she lived in when a prostitute, the blonde scalps of two children were found; in another one of her flats there were more bones hidden behind the sink, and in the wall of a fourth flat the police found more bones, a child's skull with a bit of skin and hair, and a little shoe with its sock inside. Furthermore, lots of flasks with ointments and drinks made with human bones, lard and blood were found. There were empty baptism and death certificates too, and mysterious witchery treatises, and, supposedly, some documents incriminating upper class people, which somebody later stole. After that, part of a client list with names and prices was found, but the police could not determine if it was a reliable document or not.
All the macabre discoveries earned the kidnapper and killer the nickname of The Vampire of Barcelona.
Before serving her death penalty, Enriqueta Martí tried to kill herself in prison. She made a sharp instrument with a wooden spoon and then cut her veins, but the prison nurses saved her life. This was not the only time, the nurses declared that "She was capable of inflict punitive acts on herself, with blood vomits and cataleptic states."
There was a theory that Enriqueta Martí sought her death in order not to inform on who their clients were, probably very important people of the moment. She was put into the same cell as three powerful inmates of the prison, hired to protect her from the other inmates and to prevent her from suicide. But, finally, these unusual guards didn't protect her from the riot in which every inmate women in the prison tore her apart.
It's said that that riot was caused on purpose by rich people who didn't want to see their names related to the Vampire, and even that Enriqueta Martí could have been killed by poison before the inmates destroyed her corpse. If it was true, then those people's plan worked perfectly, because today we still don't know who Enriqueta Martí's clients were.
In 1958, during the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and with the country still recovering from the Civil War, a psycopath, called José María Manuel Pablo de la Cruz Jarabo Pérez Morris, better known as just Jarabo, managed to appear on the front pages of the newspapers, and to make the Spanish people shudder with his crimes.
Jarabo has just one known violent criminal operation in his historial, in which he finished with the life of four people, two men and two women, who had the bad luck to cross the killer's path. It's thought that he could have killed another people before, but it's just a theory.
This case is specially important in Spanish criminal history because it was the first one in which the accused was considered a psycopath, as we know the definition of it today, and the first one in which this psychological peculiarity was used in the defense of the accused. So, the trial of Jarabo was the first to create a law of precedent with psycopaths in Spain.
Jarabo's parents were a couple from Puerto Rico who lived in a big house in the Spain of the Civil War. Supporters of the republican side, they ceded part of their manor to the anarchists of the CNT, who used it as their headquarters. There, a young and sentient Jarabo saw repeatedly how the anarchists executed their war prisoners with a shot in the back of the neck. This must have affected the child deeply, because, when an adult, that would be his modus operandi to murder.
At the end of the war, Jarabo's parents fled to their native Puerto Rico with their son. There, he started the tremendous pleasure-seeking lifestyle he would carry during all his life. He married a woman called Luz Marta Álvarez Mas, but they divorced after five years, while Jarabo was fullfilling a three-year penalty in a psychiatric prison in Missouri, because procurerism. In this prison, in which he were put because influence of some friends, and not for having mental problems, he learnt several things about mental diseases (for example, how to simulate a epileptic attack). Thanks to this he could create one of the fake identities he would use on the future years for fun, the one of a psychiatric doctor called Valmaseda. When released from prison in 1950, he went back to Spain, violating his parole.
The mother of the looming murderer, who used to spoil him, regularly sent vast amounts of money to him in Madrid, of which Jarabo wasted every peseta, continuing with his irresponsible habits.
The actor Paul Naschy (Jacinto Molina), who is famous throughout the world, was then a young halterofilic champion who used to hang out with Jarabo and other friends. Jarabo used to brag to them about the pace he spent his money, or about his skills of seduction. Naschy described Jarabo as a natural born seducer, capable of convincing an unknown woman to sleep with him in fifteen minutes, which is specially surprising in the field of the socially and sexually strict Francoist Spain of the 50's.
The actor described him as a scary man too, who one day put a 7,65mm gun to his head, a gun with which he would kill years later. Molina told Jarabo that it wasn't funny. Naschy saw Jarabo hitting a girlfriend of his after that, and both facts were enough for him for stop seeing the man.
Among all Jarabo relationships with women, the one he had with Beryl Martin Jones, an English girl married with a French man, is specially important for the study of his criminal case. While they were going out together, Jarabo and Beryl pawned a ring of the girl to pay for their vices.When Beryl's husband discovered that his wife had had sexual relations with another man, he demanded that she return the expensive ring back, which he had given to her as a present. Then she sent several letters to Jarabo asking for the prized ring.
The jewel in question was at that moment in a pawnshop in Madrid, called Jusfer, where Jarabo used to pawn his possessions to continue spending money in his life of luxury. The shop's owners were two men, called Félix López Robledo and Emilio Fernández Díez. They listened to Jarabo's story and accepted Beryl's letters as the owner's permission to withdraw the object, but didn't give him the ring back because he didn't have, or didn't pay, the money. Consequently, time continued to pass. One day, they told Jarabo that the deadline to recover the ring had passed, so he could not get it back.
Then, he started to plan the death of these bussinessmen who dared to confront him, and to believe that they were above his will. Killing them, Jarabo could steal the ring and all the money and expensive objects they had in their store, which he thought that would be highly valued haul.
After keeping watch on his future victims for a few days, he put his plan into action on the night of July 19, 1958. He went to López Robledo's house when he knew that the owner and his wife were outside, so the servant, a girl called Paulina, opened the door. With his personal charm and wealthy appearance, it was easy for him to convince the servant that he was a friend of the gentleman of the house, so she let him enter. Inside, Jarabo took an iron and hit the girl on her head with it, knocking her out. Then, he grabbed a knife the woman was using in the kitchen, and stabbed her in the heart, ending her life.
He moved the corpse and hid in waiting for López. When he arrived home after work, he was surprised because his servant didn't open the door, so he did so with his own key. When inside the house, Jarabo attacked him from behind, first pulling his jacket down to immobilize his arms, as North American gangsters used to do, and then shooting him in the nape with his 7,65 mm gun, as he had seen lots of times during his childhood. With his shirt covered in blood, he waited for the wife of the dead man.
When the woman arrived, Jarabo was still waiting, sitting in the living room. He told her that he was a treasury inspector, and invented a story about why her husband or the servant weren't there. The woman discovered that something was wrong, maybe because she saw her husband's blood under Jarabo's suit, and she started to run. Jarabo followed her to the bedroom, where she fell on the floor, and then he shot her in the back of the neck.
He knew that the main door of the building would be closed until morning, so he decided to spend the night inside the house, in order not to appear suspicious if someone saw him trying to go out. He changed his dirty clothes for ones from the wardrobe, and modified the scene to make the police believe that there had been a party there, and that the servant was sexually assaulted. Then, he carefully cleaned all the objects he thought that he had touched, for not to leave fingerprints.
Later, he peacefully slept in an armchair all night long. At dawn, he left the house. It was Sunday, so Jusfer didn't open that day. He spent the day going to the cinema, eating and drinking, and he left his clothes covered in blood in the dry cleaner's. It's hard to understand why he did that, being a careful killer as he was, but he was really concerned about his appearance and clothes, so probably he didn't want to throw them away.
The next day, early in the morning, he went to Jusfer when it was still closed and entered with a key he had stolen from López. He waited in the shadows for the arrival of Fernández Díez, and, when he entered, Jarabo assaulted and killed him in exactly the same way as he had killed his commercial partner. Then, he searched the store, but he was dissapointed about the loot he found, worth much less that he thought. He could not find the hidden safe, nor the ring he yearned for.
When some time had passed, he called by phone Fernández's partner, a woman called Ángeles Mayoral Martínez, and told her that he was Jarabo, and that he had been calling her husband at the store but nobody had answered. He assumed that she would arrive at the store to find out what was happening, and waited in the shadows again, to kill his last victim's girlfriend. But Ángeles Mayoral didn't go to the store, but the house of Félix López. She called at the door but nobody answered, because everybody was dead inside. Consequently, she went back home, without giving importance to all those facts. Later, some neighbors asked her why her husband hadn't opened the shop that day, so she ran to the store, worried. There, she found her husband's corpse, and later, the crime scene in López's house was discovered by the police too. Meanwhile, Jarabo had already left the place, tired of waiting, and went to leave another suit in the dry cleaner's, soaked in blood and brains.
When the police were investigating the crime scene in the pawnshop, in company of Ángeles Mayoral, Jarabo called by phone and asked Ángeles about her husband. Then, the policeman Antonio Viquera, in charge of the case, made a mental note of his name.
The news of the murders were soon on the newspapers, and the worried cleaners who had Jarabo's suits called the police, giving them the name of the client and definitive proof of his guilt. Later, Jarabo arrived the dry cleaner's by a taxi with two women, with who he had planned to have a sexual trio later. The police officers were waiting there for the suspect, so they arrested him and took him to the tribunals.
The judge decided after an intense debate that psychopathy was not a legal mitigating factor for murder, and Jarabo was condemned to death. This fact set up a very important precedent in Spanish justice.
Jarabo died by the hands of a drunk executioner. Because this fact, and the strong, wide neck of Jarabo, he suffered for about twenty minutes before the collar of the garrote vil finally killed him. By chance, he was the last person to be executed by this instrument in Spain.
Manuel Delgado Villegas, more widely known as the Arropiero, was a murderer and necrophiliac who is considered to be the most prolific Spanish serial killer in history, with 48 confessed victims in Spain, France and Italy.
Although only seven of those victims were demonstrated, it's believed that almost all the confessions of the Arropiero were true, or at least that he killed much more people than seven, between the late sixties and the early seventies.
Delgado Villegas travelled throughout Spain, France and Italy, and it's thought that he killed in all these places.
His crimes were never related between them until he confessed. All his murders had been considered before as isolated crimes, most of them known to be unsolved. He didn't have an usual reason to kill, nor knew his victims most of the times. But the main reason for which the killings were not related was that they were very much separated in space, because the wandering lifestyle of Delgado Villegas. And not only that, but his modus operandi considerably changed from one crime to another. For not to mention that the Spanish police at the moment were not used to dealing with serial killers.
His reasons to kill changed each time. Sometimes he killed for money, others for sex, and others just because of his rage. He would claim that almost everyone that he killed were homosexuals or prostitutes, that were sexually arousing him before his attack. If this is a delirium he had or just a lie, we don't know, but it was not true in most of the cases. He sometimes saw himself as a hero, killing those who deserved it or who he considered that would be happier when dead.
The Arropiero was born in Sevilla, in the south of Spain, on January 25 of 1943. He was the son of José Delgado Martín and Josefa Villegas Fernández, and the younger brother of Joaquina Delgado. His father José was a vendor of "arrope", a candy made with prickly pear, which earned him and his son the Arropiero nickname. His mother Josefa died soon after Manuel was born, because of a heart problem. The doctor had warned her that to have a second child would be fatal for her health, and he was right.
José Delgado got married soon after his first wife died, and he went to live with his new wife in Puerto de Santa María, in Cádiz. Manuel was left with his grandmother and his sister. Joaquina started to work as a servant in Mataró, and she could mantain their two relatives.
In the childhood of Manuel Delgado Villegas we already can find some violent incidents that he protagonised. The little Manuel had a dog which he buried alive, killing it. It's very common among looming serial killers to torture and kill animals in their childhood, as he did. Probably that dog was not his only animal victim.
At the age of 10, he went to school for the first time. He was thrown out soon after he opened a teacher's head with a stone. He didn't learn to read or write. Anyway, he could not, because he was a dyslexic.
When he was 12, he was already working, and he gave a beating to a workmate who had made fun of him. Soon, he decided that working was not for him, and he started to look for other ways of earning money.
At 14 years old, he started to work as a rentboy. But he did not only prostitute himself with men, but started to be known as a sex whiz among the prostitute girls, who used to give money or gifts to their beloved young Manuel. Delgado Villegas was considered to be bisexual.
Sexually, the Arropiero had a physical peculiarity. He didn't ejaculate, although he felt his orgasms. Because of this, his sperm was never found on the corpses of his victims, although he had sex with lots of them.
Delgado already had the impulse of travelling. Since he was a little boy he used to dissapear from his grandmother's house for several days, exploring the world beyond his neighborhood. His explorations increased their duration each year.
When 18, he enlistened in the Spanish legion, where he learnt the "legionary strike", a karate technique with which its possible to kill a person with one hit. The strike consists of a strong, sharp hit on the throat of the victim with the edge of the hand. If done right, the hit can break the victim's trachea, ending with their life immediately. Delgado Villegas used that technique lots of times during his killing spree.
When he got fed up of the legion, he simulated an epileptic attack to be put off from the military service. At this time, he had already perfectioned his simulated attacks. Each time he was arrested because some minor crime, he had a fake attack and was put into a psychiatric center, from where he fled. This time his trick worked again, and he was released from the legion.
In general, the life of Delgado Villegas since that moment was that of a wanderer, who travelled where he wanted to, earning money from prostituting himself, commiting small thefts, and selling his own blood.
In appearance, when an adult, the Arropiero didn't look like the dangerous serial killer he was. He was strong but short, and his face looked as that of a dumb, but not dangerous, beggar. He resembled the Mexican movies character Cantinflas, who was very popular in Spain at that moment, and he used to wear a moustache just like the one of the actor, proud of being like him.
The Arropiero commited his first known murder when 20 years old, on January 21, 1964. He was in Garraf, Barcelona, when he saw a man, called Adolfo Folch Montaner, taking a nap on the beach. Delgado thought that that man probably had a terrible life, and that he should help him to escape of it. He approached the man, grabbed a big stone, and hit him on the head, all of a sudden. The man died without awakening from his nap, and the only reason for it was that the Arropiero wanted to. That, and that he wanted to rob him. He was dissapointed about the loot.
After this murder, he travelled throughout France and Italy for about three years. During this time he worked as a hitman for the mafia of Marsella, and probably murdered several people in both countries.
The summer night of Juny 20 of 1967, in Ibiza island, Spain, a North American young man called Jules Morton Abramovitz befriended a girl in a pub. The girl was Margarete Helene Boudrie, 20 years old, French student and artist. The American hippie invited the girl to follow him to a big house, where they could have some drugs and affection. The girl accepted. While they were starting to have fun, the girl fell asleep because of the drug use, and Abramovitz left the place. He forgot to close the door... A fatal error. The Arropiero was there, watching, and noticed his slip.
Delgado Villegas went into the house with the intention of robbing it, and he was surprised when he found a nude, young girl sleeping on a mattress. He rushed towards Margarete, and when he was starting to rape her, she woke up and screamed in terror. To definitely silent the student, the Arropiero suffocated her with a pillow. He kept on having sex with her corpse when she was dead, something wich used to arouse him, as a necrophiliac he was. The total control over the body of someone was what he liked, a control which, for a mind like the Arropiero's, could be only achieved through the sexual possession of their dead remains.
When Delgado had finished, he slashed the girl's back several times to disconcert the police, and washed the corpse to erase his fingerprints.
Some hours after the killer left the crime scene, Abramovitz went back, searching for something he had lost. The scenario at the house terrified him, and with a good reason. As the main suspect of the crime, he fulfilled more than one year in prison waiting for his trial. Finally he was found not guilty, curiously thanks to a venereal disease he had, which demonstrated that he had not sex with the girl.
The third proven crime of Manuel Delgado Villegas took place on July 20 of 1968. Walking near the town of Chinchón, in Madrid, he bumped into Venancio Hernández Carrasco, a 62 years old man. The Arropiero asked him for some food, and Hernández told him to work and to earn his own money, alleging that he was a young and strong man. Delgado answered that he could not work because he was ill, and the man laughed at his face. This awakened the killer's fury.
Delgado Villegas knocked Venancio with a karate strike on the nape, and then threw him to the Tajuña river, where he drowned.
A year later, on April 2 of 1969, in Barcelona, a man called Ramón Estrada Saladich, who was a wealthy and important man, hired the Arropiero's sexual services. They met in the office of Estrada, in the center of Barcelona. The client gave Manuel less money than the stipulated, and he refused to give him more. Delgado Villegas was not going to let it pass, so he teared out the leg of a chair, and used it as a weapon to give a brutal beating to Ramón Estrada, putting him in a coma from which he would not awaken.
Then, the Arropiero stole money and all the most valuable but transportable objects he could find in the office, as a professional thief. Then he left.
The fifth legitimate victim of Manuel Delgado Villegas died on Mataró, on November 23 of 1969. Described from the killer to the police as a "fantastic chick", in an attempt to look as some kind of seducer, Anastasia Borella Moreno was, actually, a 78 years old woman who was very far away from looking "fantastic".
Anastasia Borella was returning home from her work as a cleaner in a bar, when she bumped into the Arropiero in a deserted bridge. He wanted to rob her, and finally decided to kill the old woman. He threw her from the bridge, and she almost died from the fall. The Arropiero went down and carried her into a tunnel. The woman had died before he started raping her body. Before leaving, the killer took his time in practicing oral sex on the corpse.
His two last proven crimes happened in Puerto de Santamaría. Delgado Villegas went there, where his father still lived, to help José Delgado with the sale of the arrope which gave both of them their nickname.
Here, on December 3 of 1970, Manuel met Francisco Marín Ramírez, a 24-year old young man. Marín was a lonely and shy person, who could had been an homosexual interested in Delgado. For this reason or for another one, both men went around the city together on a motorbike that the Arropiero had stolen.
They ended up sitting on a bridge. According to the killer's declaration, Marín tried to touch him more than once, but we don't know. The thing is that when they were sitting and after a small talk, Delgado Villegas delivered his legionary strike on the boy's throat. It killed him immediately, so when he fell off the bridge he was already dead. The sea swallowed his corpse.
His last victim, for whom he was caught, was a girl from Puerto de Santamaría called Antonia Rodríguez Relinque, known as Toñi by the locals. She was a 38-year old, mentally handicapped woman, with a good appeal. Antonia used to meet the truck drivers who went through the village, and to have sex with them. She did it because she wanted to, but anyway some of them gave her presents and money.
Manuel Delgado started a relationship with Antonia Rodríguez. He didn't love her, and probably he wasn't capable of loving anyone. But they maintained a relationship that he liked to have: he used to batter, rob and humiliate his girlfriend, and she liked him to do that. So they were a strange but happy couple, until one deadly Sunday evening.
On January 18 of 1972, Delgado and his girlfriend were having sex, hidden between the bushes outside the village. When having an orgasm, the Arropiero grabbed one of the girl's panty hoses and strangled her with it. Then, he raped the corpse.
Manuel Delgado, on the following days, returned three times to the place where he had left the dead body of Toñi. According to his declarations, the first two times that he went back there, he cried before the girl until he got excited and then had sex with her. The third time he visited his dead girlfriend he didn't want to have more sex with her, because the degree of decomposition of the corpse.
Meanwhile, in Puerto de Santamaría, the brother of Antonia reported her dissapearance to the police inspector Salvador Ortega. This police officer would be a very important person in the story of the Arropiero.
The policemen first believed that Toñi was with some truck driver as usual, and that she would return as always. But she didn't return, and her brother was sure that something terrible had happened to her.
Puerto de Santamaría was a little village, and it was easy for Ortega and the other investigators to know that the dissapeared girl had a relationship with a man from Sevilla, who went there to help his father in the work. When they saw Manuel Delgado Villegas for the first time, they didn't specially suspect him. About his girlfriend, he claimed that she should be with the truck drivers, and that he hadn't seen her for some days.
Later, the police officers discovered that, just before the girl's dissapearance, she had been seen arguing with Delgado Villegas, and that he had hit her during this argument.
Salvador Ortega made the Arropiero turn up in his office. The inspector quickly asked Manuel about his alibi for the day of the crime, and more quickly Delgado Villegas answered that he was at the cinema that evening. Delgado already had his hand in the pocket when Ortega started to ask him for some proof of that. The suspect showed the policeman half a ticket from the cinema that day.
It was a great alibi, but something looked really strange to the experienced inspector. Why had Delgado kept in his pocket the half ticket from days ago? Ortega called the cinema's owner, and asked him for the movies that he screened last Sunday. Then, he asked the Arropiero about the movie he had seen. He related a cowboys movie. Nothing like that had been screened that day.
Ortega was interrogating him, the Arropiero saw himself trapped, and he used his best resource: an epileptic attack. Ortega still remembers today the incredible truthfulness of his acting, which fooled even the doctor of the village.
This professional criminal, who many consider the greatest Spanish serial killer, was not easy to catch. But Ortega had a feeling about him. That attack was too much advisable for the man. So, he asked his superiors for putting Delgado Villegas under surveillance, and the judge allowed him to keep the suspect inside the station.
When the Arropiero had recovered from his "attack", he was questioned again. Finally, he confessed that he had killed Antonia. He claimed that he did it because she was unfaithful to him with the truck drivers, but probably he strangled the girl just for his own pleasure. Later, he showed the location of the corpse to the police officers.
Ortega treated the Arropiero very well, he wanted to earn his trust, praising his intelligence and methods. With this, he wanted him to confess all his story. The Arropiero, who usually had been considered a retard by the people around him, was really surprised about that man who seemed to be so amazed about his intelligence. So, Ortega achieved his objective, but he never had expected what he heard during the following conversations with the man. After the murder of Antonia, he confessed another one. And then another, and another... He ended up confessing 48 crimes. Ortega then knew that he was not in front of a common criminal.
During the following years, Manuel Delgado Villegas, Salvador Ortega, and another two inspectors, went all over Spain reconstructing and finding evidence on the Arropiero's seven crimes which they would demonstrate. Ortega and his workmates showed him interest for what he did, part pretended, part real, being amazed of how could such a monster be before their eyes, representing his own deadly past acts. During this time, it looks as if Ortega developed some kind of good relationship with the Arropiero. Probably it wasn't exactly friendship, but it's sure that Ortega never hated Delgado Villegas, according to his own declarations.
The psychiatric reports about the Arropiero talked about him as a man with mental problems and limited intelligence, who could not be fully imputable for his crimes. Ortega, among others, disagreed with that, alleging that a man of limited intelligence could not have constructed the fake alibis that he created sometimes.
In 1978, the judges stayed the case and put Manuel Delgado Villegas into a psychiatric center, where he was subjected to a highly agressive treatment with medication during almost the rest of his life. He was released in 1996, being a shadow of what he had been. He suffered from a chronic lung disease produced by the cigarettes. He died because of this on February 2 of 1998, 55 years old.
José Ignacio Orduña Mayo is a psychopath and gerontophile. He was a predecessor of another Spanish killer of old women who was much more prolific and famous; José Antonio Rodríguez Vega, about whom we will talk later in this article.
But now, we are going to meet José Ignacio Orduña, who in 1978 was a confused and not very intelligent young man living in Barcelona, with his mind full of sexual and violent fantasies protagonised by old women. He had no remorse about fulfilling in real life these erotic thoughts when he wanted to.
When Orduña Mayo was a child, he apparently was really impressed when saw the genitals of his grandmother. It's thought that this episode is an important part of the origin of his gerontophilic desires. When he commited his first crime, he was having a relationship with a woman 25 years older than he, but obviously this wasn't enough to satisfy his fantasies.
Orduña was considered a normal person among his relatives and acquaintances. He was not very good at his studies, but had a normal job and his boss was happy with him; he had no faults or reprehensible behavior. Not the case when previously he had tried to work in the same company as his father, Seat, a company from which he had been fired when caugh stealing.
On September 17, 1978, his first known violent crime occurred. He entered an old woman's flat, then hit her hard on the head and stole money from the house. He usually tried to rape his victims, but, for some reason, he could not, maybe because of erectile malfunction. Anyway, he used to undress and touch their bodies and sexual organs. He used to take small objects as mementos of his crimes too.
He repeated his first modus operandi exactly with another five women until December of that year, and one of them, Pilar Odena, died because the physical aggresion which put her in coma, this being Orduña's first murder. In another three cases, the robber was caught by unexpected visitors, an then he fled after stabbing or hitting the "intruders", but none of them died.
On January 15 of 1979, he committed a shocking crime which appeared in all the mass media, due to the age and number of the victims. Ángeles, Serafina, and Ignacia Díaz de Zulueta were three sisters of 91, 80 and 76 years old, who lived together in a humble flat in Lesseps plaza. Ángeles was paralytic, and the other two, specially Serafina, were not in very good physical condition owing to their age. The three of them were really hard of hearing too, so they had installed an electric system, which activated a series of red lights when somebody rang the door bell, so they could notice. They used to speak really loudly amongst themselves for the same reason, and the neighbors were used to hearing shouts coming from their flat. So nobody imagined the crime that was taking place there on that January 15, although some people heard the women's shrieks.
Ignacia was returning home at midday, without noticing a young man who was following her: José Ignacio Orduña. When the woman had entered her house, the criminal called, and when the door was opened he broke into the flat, hitting the weak woman with his hands until she fell unconscious and disfigured. Serafina went to the source of the fuss, where she met the fists soaked in blood of the intruder. When Serafina was unconscious too, Orduña carried her to a bedroom and put her on the bed. He took off the woman's panties, but was not capable of raping her, so started searching the house, until he met the third sister. The 91 year old woman started to shout, and he silenced her as he has done with the other two sisters: hitting her until unconsciousness, or, in this case, until death. Serafina died on the bed too, with her face bleeding and her sexual organ where it could be seen.
While Orduña was still inside, a godson of the sisters arrived with a friend of his and rang the bell. When the killer saw the red lights illuminating the house he thought that some kind of alarm had been activated, and he lost control. While the godson was outside looking through the window, because nobody had opened the door, the killer stabbed his friend, who was waiting at the door, and ran away. The man survived. The godson entered the house and found the corpses of two of his godmothers, and the other one unconscious and bleeding on the floor.
The police were soon able connect this crime with the previous ones of Orduña, via an identikit made out of the description given by the victims. Anyway, he assaulted another two women in his usual way (neither of them died) before being caught.
On March 1979 Orduña followed a new possible victim to her house. However, she lived in a very high flat for him, so he gave up, probably because this could have reduced his posibilities for running away if caught. In the building's hall, he tried to tickle a little girl, who got scared and screamed. All the people nearby, nervous because the killer of women who was on the loose, approached and grabbed Orduña, believing that he tried to attack the child. He fought back with his knife, and wounded a man with it. Noticing the fight, a policeman saved Orduña from the beating, and arrested him.
In the police station, the policemen believed his version, that everything was a misunderstanding, but just before he left, an agent recognised his face from the identikit of the killer of old women, and interrogated him about that. He confessed almost immediately.
The judge condemned Orduña to more than 86 years of jail because of the three murders and several attempted rapes, among other charges, but he served just 16. On 1997, he was released, and he went back to his old ways. He called at the door of Carmen B., a 80 year old woman, and entered her flat by force when she opened. Orduña knocked down the woman and then hit her head until one of her eyes exploded. She died.
A young girl, neighbor of the woman, was able to see the killer when leaving, but she could not identify him in the police records. His appearance had changed since he entered prison, more than sixteen years before.
Orduña attacked another two women, who did not die, and was caught because the DNA on a cigarrette end he left at a victim's flat. Then he was arrested again, and the neighbor of Carmen B. recognized him on TV.
This time, he was condemned to 21 years in jail, which could be reduced to 14. Who knows if he will kill again.
Joaquín Villalón's life is a story about murder and bizarre sex. The main events of this story, in which three people died, took place in 1981 and 1992, separated by a stay in prison.
Villalón was born to a wealthy family in 1955 in Andorra, being the younger of seven children. He was not very good at his studies, so he started to work at the age of 14. When he was doing the then mandatory Spanish military service, he deserted and fled, staying away for 18 days. It was his father who forced him to go back to the army, where he stayed for six months in the guardroom. Then, in 1977, he fled again and went to Andorra with a false identity and with his girlfriend Justa, with whom he married and had two children.
This woman, who was a lesbian, was probably the origin of Villalón's sexual paraphilia. According to his declarations, Justa forced him to wear dresses and make-up like a woman in order to have sexual relations with her. Sometimes Justa had sex with a girlfriend of hers called Mercedes, and then Villalón was obliged to watch them, wearing his woman's disguise. From the time of these experiences, Joaquín Villalón considered that he needed to disguise himself as a woman to get sexual arousal, even when he was alone.
In 1980 Villalón started to date, behind his wife's back, a girl from his work called Francisca García Coca. When Francisca, who got pregnant, found out that her boyfriend was married with children, he asked him to get divorced. This subject generated arguments between them, until July 22 of 1981. That dreadful night, during a specially heated argument, Francisca threatened to inform the authorities about his escape from the military service. This provoked Joaquín Villalón to strangle Francisca with his bare hands.
The killer conserved the corpse in the flat for three days. He bought a saw with which he cut the girl in pieces, and then he put her into three bags. Then he carried these bags to the mountains, where he left them in different places. With time, the bags were found.
When Joaquín Villalón was arrested, he had a map with the exact situations in which he had left the parts of the corpse. He was condemned to 22 years in jail for the murder and his desertion from the military service.
Finally, because of penalty reduction, he was released when he had served nine of these years. Then, with a new girlfriend and a new job in Madrid,which his brother had obtained for him, he seemed to be a new, reformed man. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
He had sexual problems with his girlfriend, but he knew what he needed: to wear woman's clothes. He didn't tell his partner this, but one night he went to a zone frequented by transvestite prostitutes, searching for some satisfaction for his special sexual needs. There he met Juan Manuel Martínez Sierra, more known as Joanna, who invited Villalón to his house to sell him his sexual services.
Villalón started to see Joanna regularly, hiring him for his pleasure. During his visits, Villalón got dressed as a woman and brushed the prostitute or listened to his sexual chat, while he masturbated. Later, Joanna introduced Villalón to another transvestite, Darío José Indalecio Castaguara, who used the name Carmen. He had the same relations with this second prostitute.
In September 27 of 1992, less than a month after Villalón had started to visit the transvestites, Carmen was subjected to the most savage act of brutality he had ever suffered. When Villalón was in Carmen's house, dressed as a woman, the transvestite invited a young girl to enter the house. Embarrassed and angry, Villalón threw the girl out. He put his men's clothes back on and had a heated argument with Carmen, which finished when Villalón used a pepper spray on the prostitute and tied a chain to his neck. The furious Joaquín carried his almost unconscious victim to the bathroom, where he covered his legs with clothes and then burnt them. He stole a video from Carmen and left the burning flat.
When the firefighters arrived at the house, they succeeded in rescuing Carmen alive, but in terrible condition. The burns on his legs were so severe that both of them had to be amputated in the hospital, and the victim died months later.
According to Villalón's declarations, both transvestites were blackmailing him; saying they would talk about their meetings, so this could have influenced him to do what he did. Anyway, it doesn't seem like the main motive, if true.
A few days later, Joanna called Villalón and told him that he knew what he had done, but the killer denied it. Two more days later, Villalón entered Joanna's flat with a key he had, and stole the prostitute's credit card. The next day Joanna called him again, and he went to the flat with the intention of obtaining the card's secret number from its owner. He hit Joanna until he was disfigured, and before falling unconscious he told the attacker the secret number. Then, Villalón drowned the prostitute in the bath. When he was dead, the killer tidied up everything in the apartment and cleaned his fingerprints. He stole Joanna's wallet, a video, and some VHS movies before leaving.
Wearing woman's clothes was not the only vice of Joaquín Villalón. In his daily life, he liked luxury and wearing expensive clothes. His appearance was that of a refined gentleman. But he didn't earn enough to lead this life. So, on the days following Joanna's death, he regularly used the credit card to withdraw big amounts of money and to pay for his whims.
He read the newspapers every morning to know if the corpse of his last victim had been found, sure that a crime like that would appear on the front pages. He planned to stop using the credit card then. But the police had already found the corpse, and kept the discovery secret precisely to catch the killer through the card. The investigation revealed that someone had been withdrawing money regularly from the cash dispensers in a certain area of Madrid, so these places were put under surveillance. Thanks to this, Joaquín Villalón was caught withdrawing money with Joanna's card.
At his trial, Villalón tried to convince the tribunal that he had a split personality which made him kill, but this fairy tale didn't work. All the nine psychiatrists who analized Villalón agreed in that he was a psychopath, intelligent, and who perfectly understood the world around him, who used his high aggressiveness to satisfy his extreme sexual fetishes. So, according to the Spanish laws, his crimes were fully imputable. He was condemned to 58 years in jail.
Francisco García Escalero, a homeless psychotic killer suffering many mental disorders, murdered at least ten people in Madrid between 1987 and 1993, all of them homeless and street prostitutes. The police never managed to catch him, until he confessed of his own free will.
He was born in a humble working family in 1954, and went to school only for one year, so he was illiterate. Since he was a child, he had necrophilic impulses which made him prefer the company of the dead more than that of the living. He was a lonely boy who used to spend his time in the Cemetery of La Almudena, near his house, with the graves that, when older, he would open to lie with the corpses. He had very early suicidal tendences too, and used to jump before the cars in the road, because he wanted to feel death for himself. His father had a feeling about his problems, and tried to heal the mind of his son with his fists, a treatment that obviously didn't work.
He used to feel very attracted to the corpses of young women, recently deceased, and he satisfied this attraction several times. He used to search through the graves of his beloved cemetery of La Almudena, and to look at the pictures of the buried people. When he saw a girl he liked, and that had not been there for too much time, he opened the grave and raped her corpse. Sometimes he slipped in the mortuaries with the same purpose. Other times, he spied on living girls or couples and masturbated when doing it.
He commited small thefts since young too, and when he was only 16, stole a motorbike and served three years in prison for that. Obviously he didn't learn the lesson, because, when released, he raped a girl before her boyfriend's eyes with the help of other three criminals. After this, he spent another eleven years in jail.
During this second stay behind bars he acquired several prison tattoos, one of them saying "Born to Die" on a grave. He used to carry dead animals to his cell, and he even conserved a dead bird in a jail.
When released from prison again, at the age of 30, he started his beggar's life, being incapable of doing anything else, more so when he had passed all his adult life in a cell. He begged, drank, and satisfied his necrophilia and voyeurism for three years, until, in 1987, he killed for the first time.
García Escalero's killing episodes always came preceeded by a massive ingestion of alcohol combined with a strong hypnotic medicine called Rohipnol. He liked to consume this dangerous mixture which, in his case, awoke his killer instinct through voices he heard in his head. Those voices told him to kill, or to open graves and take the corpses.
On August 27, 1987, he and his friend Mario Román González bought some whiskey with the money they earned begging that day. They went to an area of open ground and they drank sitting on a mattress. Escalero had their favourite pills too, and then the voices told him what to do next. He took a big stone and hit his friend, who fell with his head bleeding. Then, the attacker stabbed him several times in the back with a knife. When Mario Román was dead, García Escalero soaked him and the mattress with the whiskey he still had, and then burnt them.
In November of that year, Francisco García Escalero hired a prostitute known as Mari, whose real name never was discovered. They went to an abandoned van and had sex until the whiskey and pills, which the killer had taken before, talked with him again. He plunged his knife into her chest five times, and when she was dead he cut her head off and raped her decapitated corpse. Then, he left the crime scene with the head of Mari in a bag.
On March 5 of the following year, Escalero was drunk, walking with a friend of his, the homeless Juan Cámara Baeza. Suddenly, he took a stone and hit the head of his partner, as he did with his first victim. Then, he stabbed the man fifty four times.
A year later, on March 19, 1989, he stabbed another beggar, Ángel Heredero Vallejo, several times in his body and eyes. He cut his fingerprints too.
In May of the same year, 1989, his fifth attack took place on another area of open ground. As he did other times, Escalero hit his victim, the beggar Julio Santiesteban Rosales, on the head. The blow wasn't enough to knock down Santiesteban, so he fought back, and the Homeless Killer cut the throat of the victim, who fell bleeding to death. Then, García Escalero took Santiesteban's pants off, cut off part of his penis, and put it into his owner's mouth. After that, he burnt the corpse.
In Winter of 1990, he killed another beggar partner while drinking with him in an isolated place, as he used to do. García Escalero hit his friend Juan on the head, and stabbed him three times. But this time, the Homeless Killer comitted cannibalism too: he opened his victim's chest and removed his heart, eating a bit of it. After that, he threw the remains into a nearby cesspit.
Before that year ended, he killed again on the same place, a piece of land next to the M-30 road. He repeated his usual m.o. with the beggar Mariano Torrecilla, always after having drunk and taken Rohipnol: he hit his victim's head with a stone and stabbed him. This time, he cut off his victim's head, and a finger from which he stole a ring. Then, he threw the corpse in the same cesspit where his previous victim was.
On September, 1991, a drunk Escalero found the homeless Lorenzo Barbas sleeping on a mattress in an underground tunnel. The murderer stabbed him, and then burnt the dead man and his bed.
The night of June 8, 1993, Francisco García Escalero went into a Seven Eleven with Ángel Serrano Blanco, another beggar, and Ernesta de la O, a homeless and fat woman who had in common with Escalero a schizophrenic disorder. Suddenly, the two men decided to kidnap the woman. They carried her to one of the isolated open ground places which the homeless usually frequent, the kind of scenario for Escalero's crimes. They hit and raped the woman. When they left her, severely wounded and unconscious, they thought that she was dead, but she survived.
His ninth deadly victim was Ángel Serrano, his accomplice in the rape of Ernesta de la O. As usual, he had his drink and pills with his friend, then hit him on the head with a stone, and burnt the corpse.
His tenth and last proven victim died the same year, on September 19. Escalero was put into a psychiatric hospital when he had been caught having sex with a dead girl. There, he met Victor Criado, a schizophrenic but peaceful patient, and both of them fled from the center that deadly September night. They ended up next to the fence of the cemetery of La Almudena, the killer's favourite place, and started to drink. Escalero had his pills too, and the voices arrived. Once again, a stone opened his victim's head, and the corpse ended in flames.
When confessing, Escalero assumed four more murders: a stabbed man found in 1990 in El Retiro park, a transexual prostitute, an old woman, and a prostitute found decapitated and burnt on 1987. These four cases were not proved.
That schizophrenic homeless managed to avoid justice during a killing spree which lasted years. This is even more suprising if we believe the psychiatrists who claimed that he has a limited intelligence.
One day, he jumped in the middle of the road as he used to do as a child. A car hit him and he was carried to the hospital. There, he confessed all his crimes to the nurses.
When arrested, he had no problems in talking about his crimes. More than that, he was really pleased about all the attention and fame he was having, an attention he never felt before. He granted TV interviews, was interrogated by psychiatrists and policemen, and talked about his life and his crimes with all of them, glad of having someone listening.
The judge declared him mentally ill and not responsible for his acts. He was interned into the psychiatric jail center of Foncalent, Alicante, where he started a very strict treatment with medication. Today, he is alive and following his treatment, and he hasn't shown violent behavior since he was in the hospital. The homeless people of Madrid are still afraid of his name, and they pray that he will never be released.
Someone could be surprised, specially in the late eighties and early nineties, how easy it was to find in Spain a lot of old and wrinkled women who were terrified of the posibility of someone raping them. The main reason for this generalized horror had a name: José Antonio Rodríguez Vega, who in only one year, from April 1987 to April 1988, raped and killed at least 16 women between 61 and 93 years old, in Santander, Cantabria. With sixteen proven victims, he is the serial killer with the highest number of proven murders on his record in all Spain's history, and probably he killed many more times.
He was really different in his methods from José Orduña Mayo, the other famous Spanish killer of old women. While Orduña was a man of limited intelligence, impulsive and disorganized, Rodríguez Vega was an intelligent and "organized serial killer", according to the FBI's clasification, and a man obsessed with order. These psychological peculiarities helped this murderer to hide his guilt, making the police believe that most of his victims had died of natural causes.
José Antonio Rodriguez Vega was born in a working-class family. His father was a worker, and his mother was part housewife, part cleaning woman. He had five siblings.
According to his declarations to the prominent criminal psychiatrist José Antonio García Andrade, when Rodríguez Vega was just a 8-year old boy he had a curious sexual experience. A woman who was a friend of his, a 50-year old widow, touched the boy's sexual organs and undressed herself, and went to bed with him. There, she told Rodríguez to touch her breasts and vagina, which he did. After that experience, he masturbated frequently remembering the woman.
He talked about another significant childhood experience. When he was watching his mother from the back, while she was kneeling on the floor, cleaning, he noticed her nude thighs and got excited. He declared that he always felt a mixture of attraction and hate for his mother. "Every man has sometimes felt desires of raping his mother", was one of his weird declarations, during an interview.
Part of the hate that Rodríguez Vega felt for his mother could have come from an episode in which he battered his father, who was terminally ill. The mother of José Antonio threw him out of the house because of that.
When he was 14, he finished elementary studies and started to work first as a carpenter, and then as a building worker, a job that he would do for years.
He was a difficult and violent teenager, who used to beat his siblings. At the age of 18, he got married to María del Socorro, a girl of his age, and they had a child. Rodríguez Vega and his wife had problems. She usually asked him for sex, and he used to refuse, saying that he was tired because of working. Meanwhile, he started to rape women. At first he went after young girls, like his wife, but with each attack the age of his victims increased, while he was getting closer to his real tastes. During this time, he was nicknamed The Motorbike Rapist. In 1978 he was arrested for these crimes, and condemned to 27 years in prison.
By this time, he had developed excellent social abilities. He was a charming, likeable person, who could easily make people feel confortable with him, not only because of his charisma, but in a big part because of his nice-looking face. He seemed like a normal, good guy, the kind of person nobody would think was a rapist or a serial killer.
While in prison, he used this personal charm of his to convince the women that he had attacked to forgive him, and he achieved his goal with all of them but one. This fact influenced the reduction of his penalty, of which he only served eight years in the end.
Before being released in 1986, his wife left him, and then he married a 23-year old girl with a mental deficiency, called Mari Nieves. He used to abuse this second wife and to humiliate her, but outside their house nobody knew that. For most of his acquaintances, José Antonio was a nice person.
On April 15, 1987, with the age of 30, José Antonio Rodríguez Vega killed for the first time. He was having sex with a 61-year old prostitute called Victoria Rodríguez, when suddenly he covered the woman's mouth and nose with his hand, and suffocated her until death. He took some belongings from his victim's house as mementos of his "achievement"; specifically a picture of a saint, some clothes, and 22.000 pesetas. Then he peacefully left the place. A monster had been unleashed.
This was a previous version of the meticulous modus operandi he would use to kill all his following victims. He used to spy for some time on the women he wanted to kill, learning their habits. Then, he earned his way inside his victims' houses with any excuse. He could say that he wanted to rent a flat, or that he was there to repair any electric appliance, like the TV or the washing machine. Usually, he used his real position as a building worker to enter the houses, for example to install a new reinforced door, or any other similar job that an old woman could need. In this particular aspect, his m.o. was really similar to that of Albert DeSalvo, the infamous Boston Strangler.
When he entered the houses, he easily earned the trust of the women with his charm, as they were old people who lived alone and greatly appreciated the company. Then, he used to leave, and to come back at another moment, with any excuse. The women always remembered that lovely man who had repaired their TV or their door, so they granted Rodríguez Vega entry and offered him drinks and snacks.
José Antonio used to sit down with the women, talking with them, watching TV and eating something, until he decided to approach them in a sexual way. When the women put an end to his attempts, as always happened, he violently attacked, raped and killed them. To kill, he put his hand over the nose and mouth of the victims, as he did with the first one, while with the other hand he touched and penetrated their vaginas. He raped them not only with his penis and hand, but sometimes with broomsticks or other objects he could found.
When he finished, he always took mementos from the house and victim, and straightened everything up to make the police believe that there had not been a struggle in the house. This way of suffocating the victims, with his hand blocking their respiratory ducts, made the medical examiners believe that the women had died by natural causes, specifically because of a heart failure produced by a lung edema. That being the case when somebody in the family suspected something, or when the killer made a little mistake; otherwise, death by natural causes was assumed because of the age of the victims, and there was no autopsy.
The first time that someone suspected that a serial killer of old women was on the loose, was in January of 1988, after the corpse of Carmen Martínez, 65 years old, was found. Her daughter, Soledad González, found several strange details. The dead woman was covered with a sheet and a blanket perfectly tucked under the matress. She was wearing a dressing gown, and had her two hands crossed over the chest, which looked unnatural for a woman who died alone. She had bruises on thighs, neck and face. Over the table, there were underclothes belonging the woman. She had her wedding ring and her dead husband's one on different fingers, when she always wore them on the same, and another ring of hers was missing. With all of this, Soledad González was sure that her mother had been murdered. But the forensic surgeon was clear: natural causes.
Soledad didn't give up and told her story to a newspaper from Santander. Then this crime was related to other two old women's murders which were on police records, one from August 1987, and one October 1987.
In the first one, Margarita González, 82 years old, was found with bruises on her corpse and without underwear. The dentures of the woman, which Rodríguez Vega forced her to swallow, was found inside her throat. During the autopsy, the examiner detected a rape carried with a broomstick.
In the second one, Natividad Robledo, 66 years old, was found without underwear, and with dry blood on her vagina and legs. In both cases, several objects of the house were missing.
So, on January 27, the newspaper El Diario Montañés, encouraged by Soledad González's story, published an article talking about a sadistic serial killer who haunted old women in the city. Anyway, the police didn't investigate this enough, or didn't find any evidence if they did.
While Rodríguez Vega killed more and more women with nobody making him stop, he developed a non-realistic belief about being impossible to catch by the police, whom he considered dumb. This kind of thought is very common among serial killers. Usually, when they start to think that way, they are less careful when they kill.
Maybe that's what happened to Rodríguez Vega on April 19 of 1988, when he carelessly left the corpse of Julia Paz, a 71-year old woman, on the floor of her flat, just near the front door, resting without underwear in a big puddle of her own blood.
This last corpse was found in Muriedas, a small village near Santander, where the Civil Guard had jurisdiction. They were the ones who found a visiting card from José Antonio Rodríguez Vega, building worker, in the house of the dead woman. The civil guards checked Rodríguez's police record, and found about his former career as The Motorbike Rapist. Then, they were sure about who the serial killer was.
On May 19, 1988, José Antonio Rodríguez Vega was arrested and interrogated. He soon talked in detail about several of his crimes, many more than the four he was accused of. But, when talking about them, he never confessed to having killed the women. Some of his versions were that one of those women had agreed to have sex with him, or that he had attacked her, but she had not died before he left the house.
When Rodríguez Vega's house was searched, the police officers found a room all in red, like some kind of sanctuary, containing all the mementos that the killer had stolen from his victims' houses. There were jewels, watches, ashtrays, and all kinds of everyday objects, even televisions.
The police showed all those objects to the families of old women who had died in the previous years, and several of them recognized belongings of their deceased relatives. That's the way we know that the minimum number of victims of this ruthless killer was sixteen, which is confirmed by Rodríguez Vega's detailed but part fake stories. There were more than 300 objects which nobody knows who they belonged to. This suggests that the victims of the Killer of Old Women of Santander were many more than sixteen.
All the 16 known victims of José Antonio Rodríguez Vega, raped and killed, are the following, in the order they died from April 1987 to April 1988: Victoria Rodríguez, 61 years old; Simona Salas, 83; Margarita González, 82; Josefina López, 86; Manuela González, 81; Josefina Martínez, 84; Natividad Robledo, 66; Catalina Fernández, 93; María Isabel Fernández, 79; María Landazabal, 78; Carmen Martínez, 65; Engracia González, 78; Josefina Quirós, 82; Florinda Fernández, 85; Ángeles Soto, 85; and Julia Paz, 71.
At his trial, he behaved like a quiet person, dressed as a gentlemen, showing no trace of embarrassment or guilt, and ignoring the shouts and insults which the relatives of the victims threw at him. He declared himself innocent, but nobody believed his story, counting on the evidence and his previous declarations. Described by the justice as psychopath who searched for satisfaction for his deviant and violent sexual desires, but who knew perfectly what he was doing at every moment, he was condemned to 440 years in prison.
Finally, because of a sentence reduction, he was going to be released before 2003. During his two stays in prison, he earned a reputation between the other inmates as being an informer. And, during this second time he was in jail, he used to brag to his prison mates about his grannie-raping and killing crimes. So, he was not the most popular inmate in Topas prison, in Salamanca, when on October 24 of 2002 he met Enrique Valle González and Daniel Rodríguez Obelleiro, among other men, in the prison yard.
An inmate hit Rodríguez Vega on the back of the neck with a stone, and then Enrique Valle and Daniel Rodríguez jumped on him with stilettos in their hands. A prison guard saw how everything occurred, but could do nothing: when he tried to enter the yard, one of the inmates threatened him with his weapon, shouting "Do you want to defend a rapist!?" The inmates stabbed Rodríguez Vega first in the nape, then in the eyes, taking both of them out. They even took out brains through the sockets with their blades. When he was dead, Enrique Valle plunged his stiletto 113 times into his chest. At the end, they peacefuly gave their weapons to the guards. They would declared that they had done society a favour.
Anyone who lived in Spain during the 90's, and who was not shut away in a bunker witout any connection to the outside world, has heard about the murder of the "Girls of Alcasser", three teenage girls who were brutaly raped, tortured and killed in 1992. It truly was a shocking crime, but the main reason why it is so extremely famous was the ridiculously excessive deployment of the mass media around the case. The journalists invented and supported lies and groundless theories to gain a greater audience and, consequently, more money. The inhabitants of Alcasser, Valencia, the family of the main killer, and specially the parents of the victims, were interviewed and shown on the TV for months as part of the circus the media created in the village.
The most famous invented theory, which some people still believe and even one of the girls' fathers actively supported on media, claims that after the deaths of the girls there was a ring of wealthy people, who paid the killers for extreme pornographic and snuff tapes involving minors. So, this theory maintains that the children were killed for the creation of one of these movies. There isn't any proof of that, and it's pure speculation.
Maybe the belief in this kind of convoluted realities makes the grotesque death that the girls suffered more digestible. But the truth, or at least the official and most believable one, is that two violent criminals decided to rape and kill the girls just for the sake of it.
The escape of Antonio Anglés, the main culprit of the crime, who is still missing, has caused the dark legend around these murders to grow.
Anglés was born in 1966 in Brasil, the fourth child of an illiterate Brasilian girl, and a Spanish cook, who was a heavy drinker. The family moved to Spain, where they had another five children, and they all ended up living in a ramshackle house in Valencia, where the father was from.
The family was barely maintained by Neusa Martins, the mother, while Enrique Anglés, the father, used to beat his wife to getting money off her, but had no authority over the children. Antonio Anglés, a psychopath, soon assumed a domineering role in the family, battering both his siblings and his mother, when he was not in prison for robbing or drug trafficking. Some of the other kids had several mental problems, and all of them were almost illiterate, because they were not obliged to go to school, so they didn't do.
Soon after his father died, Anglés kidnapped and tortured a girl for two days, in January of 1990. Nuria Pera Mateu was then a 20-year old drug addict who had a debt to Antonio Anglés, because of drug dealing. She met Anglés to pay her debt, but she didn't gathered all the money yet, fact which unleashed the pusher's fury. He gave the girl a hiding and then forced her to go to the house of the Anglés family, where he tied her to a bed with a six-metre chain, and frequently beat her for two days. He abused the girl psychologically too, threatening to throw her into a pit, or to make a doberman dog attack her.
The other members of the family did nothing, afraid of Antonio, except Ricardo, an older and paranoid brother of his, who finally reported the kidnapping to the police. Antonio Anglés was arrested and put in jail for the fifth time in his life.
On March 12, 1992, he was released from prison on a permit, and he didn't go back. For some reason, nobody went after him, so he kept on with his normal life.
Anglés started to live with Miguel Ricart, a vicious man without any self-confidence, who would be the submissive part in the killer pair who murdered the girls. In almost every case of two killers who acted as a team, we can find that one of them is the domineering part, who directs all the murdering, while the other one just gladly follows his partner's commands. It's thought that this is the case here, Antonio Anglés being the director of the macabre staging.
The Friday evening on November 13 of 1992, Toñi Gómez Rodríguez, 15 years old; Desirée Hernández Folch, 14; and Miriam García Iborra, 14; were hitchicking on a road near their home in Alcasser. They wanted to go to a discotheque called Coolor, and two men in an Opel Corsa car agreed to pick them up. They were Antonio Anglés and Miguel Ricart.
When the car passed by the discotheque the girls got scared, and Anglés beat them with his gun and tied them up. The kidnappers carried the unlucky girls to an abandoned house, where they tied two of them to a post, and threw the other one on a mattress, where they would torture and rape her. When they decided that they had finished with the first one, they tied her to the post and repeated the process with the other two.
The raping and torturing the killers subjected the girls to was absolutely brutal. They raped their vagina and anus and introduced hard objects on them. They beat them with hands and sticks, and cut a nipple of one of them with a knife or with tongs.
At the end, they carried the girls outside the house. According to Miguel Ricart's declarations, at that moment they stopped crying, thinking that they were going to be released. But Antonio Anglés shot the three children in the head, killing them. Then, the rapists buried the corpses and went back to their house.
On January 27, 1993, the corpses of the girls were found, together with a Social Security referral note with the name of one of Antonio Anglés' brothers. The police went to the family's house, were both killers lived. But Antonio Anglés had heard on the radio the news that the corpses had been found, and he already had fled from there when the police officers arrived. Miguel Ricart didn't know anything about the discovery, and was caught when he was returning home. He confessed and was condemned to 170 years in jail.
Meanwhile, Antonio Anglés was making his way out of the justice's sight. He managed to reach Lisbon, Portugal, where he slipped aboard a British ship called City of Plymouth. Although he was caught by the ship's crew members, they didn't know who he was, and when the ship arrived on the coast of Dublin, Ireland, he had fled in some way.
All the drowned corpses found near that coast over the following days were identified, and none of them was that of Anglés. Besides, eye witnesses claimed later to have seen him in Dublin's harbor, and a life preserver from the City of Plymouth was found abandoned nearby. Since then, Antonio Anglés has been missing.
In the last few years, lots of clues and witnesses have identified Anglés in different places throughout North and South America. Some of these clues were fakes and even set-ups made for profit, but other ones are believed to be reliable. Even though, none of them ended with the arrest of the killer of Alcasser, who is still being searched for by the Interpol and by the Spanish police forces.
In the decade of the 90's, Spain saw an increase in the number of murders in which the killers were minors. It was in January 2001 when the Law of the Minor came into effect, forbidding minors to be put into the conventional prisons, and sending them to special educational centers instead. Furthermore, this law determined that the maximum penalty for a criminal younger than 18 was of eight years.
In this chapter, we'll see the three more famous cases of Spanish minor killers.
-Javier Rosado and Félix Rodríguez. The main culprit of the called "Crime of the Role Playing Game", Javier Rosado, was not exactly a teenager: he was 21 years old at that moment, in 1994. But his accomplice, Félix Rodríguez, was only 17.
Javier Rosado was a chemistry student at university, who didn't have friends of his age. He used to hang out with sentient high school students who he easily impressed with his "high intelligence", a product of his older age. Félix Rodríguez, a lonely boy coming from a broken family, was specially close to Rosado, seeing in him an older brother and a master, somebody to trust in.
Rosado and his teenage friends used to meet to play an amateur role playing game called "Razas" (Races) which Rosado invented. Presumably, he included in this game all the psycopathic fantasies and thoughts that he had, while he was getting ready for the real thing.
One day, he convinced his friend Félix to kill somebody, to know how it felt. Félix Rodríguez blindly followed all his master's orders, being both another example of the typical domineering-and-submissive killer team. So, the night on April 30 1994, both friends went out to kill. After a few discarded objectives, they selected Carlos Moreno Fernández, a man who was waiting for the bus, peacefully sitting on the sidewalk.
When Moreno saw the two young men approaching him with their knives, they offered them money, believing that they wanted to rob him. But they didn't want the money. Rosado slashed his throat, seriously wounding him, and the man tried to run. Then, Rosado grabbed Moreno from behind, and both killers stabbed him several times in his face and body. Rosado put his hand into the big slash in the victim's throat, and grabbed his trachea and esophagus, destroying them.
After the murder, Javier Rosado related all of this in detail in a text which would be found later in his house. In this diary, the killer wrote that he had no feeling of remorse about the murder, and that if he were not be caught, he would kill again.
For his next "expedition", Javier Rosado tried to recruit the other boys in his role playing group, and told them about his first murder. One of these boys, Enrique Martínez, got scared and told everything first to a priest, and then to a friend and to his mother, who called the police. Rosado and Rodríguez were arrested, and in their houses the weapons and the text describing the murder were found.
Javier Rosado tried to fool the justice acting like a madman with a multiple personality disorder, and there was an intense debate among psychiatrists about his mental condition, but finally he was caught because of his own declarations.
Rosado was condemned to 42 years in prison, and Félix Rodríguez to just 12, in part for his condition as a minor.
When this crime and trial took place, all mass media misled the audience making them believe that the boys were "playing a role playing game" when they killed, or that the role playing games incited them to murder. Consequently, a lot of Spanish people who didn't know what a role playing game was (the same as the journalists who created all these stories), started to relate this kind of entertainment to murder, satanism, and violent behavior. Lots of innocent role-players, who found their grandmothers screaming in terror about their hobby, paid for this media set up.
-José Rabadán. On April 1, 2000, in Murcia, José Rabadán, a 16-year old boy more commonly known as "The Katana Killer", killed his family with a Japanese sword.
José was fond of martial arts and oriental philosophy, and he had a huge collection of sharp weapons. That morning, he had decided to take his katana and end with his parents and sister's lives. He didn't hate them, nor was he a psychopath. He didn't enjoy the murder and had no reason for killing his close relatives. But he decided that it was the best option: he would make his parents stop suffering from their daily problems, and for having to take care of his younger sister, a 9-year old child with Down's Syndrome. The sister should die too, what else could she do without her carers? For him, for José, this would be the first step in a new life, which he would live on his own, without parents.
That's the reasoning José Rabadán thought that he was following when he entered his parent's room with his katana, and killed his father slashing his head several times. Soaked in blood, José went then to his sister's room, where his mother was too. He first attacked his mother. He opened her head, and noticing that she was still alive, slashed her more times, wanting to stop her suffering. Then, he killed his crying sister too, who fell with the first strike. He took his machete and stabbed both of them, to be sure that they were dead.
Then he fled, and he called the police to confess, but at first his call was taken as a joke. He went to Valencia. He wanted to take the train for Barcelona, where he would meet a girl, a close friend of his who he met through the internet, and whom he had called several times since the murders. At the train station, a few days after the crime, he was caught, when he already was the most wanted fugitive in Spain.
Although, at first, he showed himself to be very calm when confessing, during his final declarations to the psychiatrists he showed signs of true regret. The only reason the pshychiatrists could find for him to do what he had done, was a cerebral lesion. So, the causes were pathological, they even could be seen. The judge listened to the doctors' opinion, and José Rabadán was declared not responsible for his acts. Anyway he was temporarily imprisoned, but in January of 2001, with the coming into effect of the Law of the Minor, he was tmoved to an educative center where he served a 8 years penalty.
In this case, the press did it again. After the deaths of the Rabadán family, the media went crazy and claimed that the killer was trying to emulate Squall, the main character of Final Fantasy VIII. This role playing videogame was found during the search of the boy's dorm, among many other unimportant things. Although it's true that he had a Final Fantasy videogame in his house (like lots of teenagers at that moment), he wasn't a true fan of it, and definitely he didn't kill his family because of the game.
José Rabadán received lot of mail from Spanish teenagers who became fans of his, and who praised him for what he had done. Two of these teenagers were Iria Suárez and Raquel Carlés.
-Iria Suárez and Raquel Carlés, "The Witches of San Fernando". On May 26 of 2000, Iria Suárez, 16 years old, and Raquel Carlés, 17, killed Clara García Casado, a friend of them who was 16 years old.
Iria was a teenage girl obssessed with satanism, occultism and horror fiction. She achieved the reputation of being a real witch among her high school mates, and used to lead meetings with her friends in order to practise esoteric and satanic games and rituals, like the ouija board. With time, these friends of Iria thought that she was too possesive and manipulative with them, so they grew apart from her. Iria started to feel alone, isolated from the rest of the world, except for her friend Raquel.
Raquel Carlés was a violent girl raised in a broken family. Having bad relationships with the majority of students of her high school, she found in Iria a true friend, someone with whom she could felt appreciated and important. She became a fond of her friend's hobbies, so she got the reputation of being a witch too.
One day, they started to play with the idea of killing somebody. They had been thinking about it for a short time when they heard about the crime of José Rabadán. The girls decided to take "The Katana Killer" as a role model, and made their fantasies real. They would declare that they killed to know how it feels.
In May 23, 2000, they tried to attack a woman called María Regla in a public WC, but she had a feeling about their intentions when she saw them, and ran away, saving her life.
Then, the looming killers decided to attack someone who knew and trusted them, someone who would not flee. The chosen one would be Clara García Casado, an old friend of theirs. Raquel took the phone that May 26, and told Clara that they wanted to meet her to remember old times.
That night, the three girls were on an open ground area with some beers, talking. Suddenly, Iria grabbed Clara from behind, immobilizing her, and Raquel cut the victim's throat with a knife. Clara fell off on the ground, and Raquel stabbed her fourteen times in the back. After that, they went home to change their blood soaked clothes, and then went out for a walk, as if nothing had happened.
They had been seen with Clara, and the victim's boyfrend knew that she was with them, so they were soon arrested after the discovery of the corpse. During the questioning, they confessed.
They were going to have recourse to the Law of the Minors, but many people protested, demanding a more severe penalty for the crime. These demands were made in vain, and they were put into an educational center for eight years. Finally, both of them were released on parole on 2006, and now they are free.
Joaquín Ferrándiz Ventura, born in 1963 in Valencia, was a charming young man, who had his group of friends, a good job as an insurance agent, and frequent relationships with attractive women. But this life was extremely boring for him, a psychopath who wanted really strong experiences. That's why he strangled to death at least five women between July 1 of 1995 and September 14 of 1996, acting in the city of Castellón and its surroundings, where he lived with his mother.
As most Spanish young people, Ferrándiz used to go out to bars all night on weekends. He drank with his friends and met girls in the pubs and discotheques. He was considereded an introverted, decent guy, and some people who didn't know him very much even thought that he was gay, despite his success with women.
That was because he used to be serious and quiet even in bars. There, he was thrown into analyzing his surroundings, specially the girls around him. With his observation, he could learn the habits of each girl of his city: which bars did they frequent, if they had a boyfriend, if they used to go with many men... This valuable knowledge was used by him not only to look for new girlfriends, but to haunt his victims and make them fall into his traps. At certain hours of the night, Ferrándiz used to leave his friends and to go alone throughout the bars, just watching.
In 1983, Ferrándiz, or "Ximo", as his friends used to call him, met a girl called Beatriz, with whom he would have the longest relationship in his life. Ferrándiz was heterosexual, and completely functional when having normal sex.
Although Ferrándiz would go out with many women in his life, they were superficial relationships, and his girlfriends always ended up leaving him. He sometimes got obsessed because of that, but, analizing the diary he wrote about his conquests, it can be seen that he never was really in love.
In April of 1989 Beatriz left Joaquín. It looks as if it didn't affect him. It could be true or not, but, on August 6 of the same year, he commited his first violent crime.
After going out with a couple of friends, he took his car, alone, and followed an 18-year old girl called Maria José who was riding her motorbike. Ferrándiz hit her on purpose simulating an accident, and then he offered to take her to hospital. Maria José, with her ankle wounded and bleeding, accepted.
Ximo took the girl to the forest, and then attacked her. Threatening the young girl with a knife, he undressed and tied her, and put a cloth into her mouth. Then, he tried to rape her with a dildo, but he could not even with the use of vaginal lubricant. The terrified girl could say that, if he let her go, she would not tell that to anyone. Ferrándiz left her at the hospital, and the girl reported the rape.
Joaquín Ferrándiz was arrested. He declared himself innocent, but the blood of the girl in his car condemned him. In spite of it, he could convince his mother, a widow called Asunción Ventura, and his acquantainces, that he was innocent.
He was condemned to 14 years of prison. His mother, who thought that her son had been the victim of an act of injustice, actively protested against Joaquín's imprisonment, and even sent a heart-rending letter to the real victim, accusing her.
Ferrándiz was an exemplary inmate, and his penalty was reduced to six years. He was released in April 4 of 1995. With his friends and family trusting in him, and with excellent reports about his behavior in jail, he returned back to normal life.
Three months later, he killed for the first time.
The night on July 1 of 1995, Joaquín Ferrándiz went with his friends to celebrate the birthday of one of them. Meanwhile, Sonia Rubio Arufat, 24 years old, was having some fun with her friends after coming back from England. Around 5 o'clock in the morning, Sonia was exhausted and wanted to go home. She was walking alone in the street, wishing that somebody appeared and took her in a car. And it happened.
The handsome and charming Ferrándiz, whom Sonia slightly knew before that day, convinced the girl to go with him in his car. They went to an isolated place and kissed each other. Joaquín thought that they were going to have sex, but, in some moment, Sonia told him to stop. She wanted to go home. But she would not go home again.
Ferrándiz beat her, tied her hands with her own shirt, put her panties into her mouth and covered it with adhesive tape. Then, he murdered the girl strangling her. To hide the corpse, he put a sack and branches over all her body. He put a bucket on her head too.
He didn't raped this first victim nor would rape any of the following ones. According to Dr. Vicente Garrido, psychologist, Ferrándiz's reasons to kill were not exactly sexual, but he wanted to have strong experiences, and enjoyed dominating the women to the extreme of killing them. He didn't want to torture the girls, but to make them suffer a fast, brutal death.
Nobody suspected Joaquín when the police started the search for the dissapeared Sonia, and he kept on with his life as if nothing happened.
When Sonia's corpse was found, the police got a curious clue. The adhesive tape found on her mouth was 18 mm wide, but the one made and distributed in Spain was always 19 mm. So, that tape was not easy to see there: if they could find the man with the 18 mm tape, maybe they could find the killer.
Joaquín Ferrándiz used to visit certain place on the road known as "La Ralla", where drug addict prostitutes offered their services for a small price. In one of the visits, with the company of a friend, the prostitute with Ferrándiz went out of his car screaming, claiming that he was hurting her.
On an indefinite night of August of 1995, Ferrándiz took in his car another prostitute of La Ralla. She was Natalia Archelos Loaría, 23 years old. They went to a lonely place, where Archelos got naked, prepared to have sex. Suddenly, Ferrándiz took the woman's clothes and violently strangled her with them. He took the corpse near the river Mijares, where he hid it in the bushes.
A month later, he repeated the same m.o. with another prostitute of the same age, Francisca Salas León. This woman tried to defend herself attacking Ferrándiz with a syringe, but the killer took it off her and plunged it into her forehead. Then he beat Francisca, tied her hands with her panties, and strangled the unlucky prostitute with his bare hands. He hid his dead victim in a place near Natalia's corpse.
A few days later, once again on an undetermined night, he killed a third prostitute, catching her in the same way. She was Mercedes Vélez Ayala, 25 years old. As usual, he tied the woman with her clothes and strangled her with his hands. Before hiding the corpse, he put a plastic bag on her head.
The three bodies were found between 27 January and 2 February of 1996. After the first one, the other two were easily found, because of their proximity.
Due to the differences in the victims' social status, the murders of the three prostitutes weren't related to Sonia's. The killed prostitutes were workmates and friends between them, and they had common enemies too, like two pimps who were the firsts in being investigated. Finally, the police arrested a truck driver called Claudio Alba Hidalgo as the main suspect of these last three crimes. He was in prison for a long time, but finally he was released.
While the police were searching for the killer in the underworld, the real murderer kept on haunting the night of Castellón.
The night of September 14, 1996, a 25-year old girl called Amelia Sandra García was having some fun in the bars, without knowing that she was bound to die at the next sunrise.
Almost in the morning, she was returning home when a car crossed her path. It was the car of Joaquín Ferrándiz, who seduced her with his charm. They went to an isolated place where they had sex. Although, according to the killer's declarations, he had not planned to kill her at first, when Amelia left the car for a moment to get dressed, he suddenly hit her on the head and face with a stone. Then Ferrándiz tied Amelia's hands with her clothes and strangled her with his hands.
The series of crimes in Castellón were not being considered as a common case, so the Civil Guard had finally the help of their UCO (Operative Central Unit), a group of specialists prepared for the hardest cases. The case of the murderer of Castellón is specially important in Spanish criminal history, because it was the first in which the Spanish police forces made up a psychological profile of the killer in order to catch him. This technique, created by the North American FBI, had been already used in many other countries, where it worked. The professional selected to make the profile was the criminal psychologist Vicente Garrido, who made an excellent work putting the men of the UCO on Ferrándiz's trail.
But it was not only this profile which put the murderer in UCO's spotlight. The night of February 15 of 1998, Ximo saw from his car a 19 year-old girl, called Lidia, walking on the street. He violently attacked the girl, forcing her to enter the car. The fuss alerted a neighbor, who went out with a stick. Ferrándiz fooled the man, making him believe that he was having a couple's argument. Meanwhile, the girl escaped and reported Ferrándiz.
The killer told an unbelievable story about himself peeing on the street and the girl being offended because of that.
The men of the UCO knew that Joaquín Ferrándiz was the serial killer behind the five deaths, but they didn't have evidence of that, so they put him under extreme surveillace 24 hours each day, trying to catch him and to put an end to his future attacks.
The Civil Guard spied on the murderer during weeks, and one day his efforts bore fruit. The night of July 12 of 1998, Ferrándiz started to follow a 21 year-old girl called Silvia Barizo Carrillo. The investigators could see how, when the girl was inside a discotheque, the suspect did something to her car's wheel. He prepared the car so she would have an accident.
When the girl left, she was followed by Ferrándiz, who, in turn, was followed by the UCO. Silvia's car had an accident near a gas station, and Ferrándiz, apparently acting as a gentlemen, rescued the girl and put her into his car, to take her to the hospital. Some Civil Guards, acting as worried spectators, entered Ferrándiz's car too and went with him to the hospital, saving the girl's life.
After that, Joaquín Ferrándiz was arrested, but didn't confess anything. Finally, the judge Albiñana, in charge of the case, ordered a search in Ferrándiz's house, without having another option.
During the search, Ferrándiz showed himself confident and even mocking. But the investigators got a glad surprise: they found the 18 mm adhesive tape used in Sonia's murder. An astonished Ferrándiz was arrested because of this.
After three months arrested, Joaquín gave up and confessed to all of theother four murders. Ferrándiz showed the UCO all the five crime scenes, giving them information which only the killer could know.
On December 1 of 1999, Joaquín Ferrándiz Ventura was condemned to 69 years in jail.
From January to March of 2003, the city of Madrid was terrified by a ruthless shooter who killed six people, and tried to kill another three. He selected his victims randomly in the street, killing them with his gun without any reason. He left cards from the Spanish deck of playing cards at the crime scenes, a fact which made him earn the nickname of "The Deck Killer".
Alfredo Galán Sotillos was born in Puertollano, Ciudad Real, in 1977. His mother died when the younger sister of Alfredo was born, when he was only 5 years old. He was never a good student, and he dropped out of high school. He used to fantasize about being a hero, and when he was 21 years old he joined the army to try to do so for real. He soon excelled at his work and was promoted to corporal. Obviously, during his training as a soldier he learnt to shoot.
He was stationed in Bosnia, in Eastern Europe, where he fullfilled two humanitarian missions. There, he acquired the rare Tokarev 7,62 mm gun he would use to kill years later. He smuggled the weapon into Spain hidden in a TV.
When he went back to Spain, he was stationed in Galicia to help to clean an oil spill in the sea which had caused a serious ecological disaster, brought about by the oil tanker "Prestige". He had not had a single holiday since his arrival, and his lawyer would claim that that's why he lost control in the following days.
While working in Galicia, Galán showed violent behavior. He confronted a superior, and later, while being drunk, he hit a woman's car with a stone, and tried to take her out by force and to steal the car. The military police sent him to a psychiatric hospital. There, he was relieved of his work because of depression and anxiety, and sent home, where he started to prepare the necesary tests to work as a security guard.
On January 24 of 2003, Alfredo Galán was peacefully watching TV in his house, when he decided that he wanted to kill somebody, to know how it feels. He took his gun and drove to the center of Madrid, searching for a victim. He followed a postwoman first, but finally he let her go, and entered a building he found open. Inside, the superintendent of the building, Juan Francisco Ledesma, was taking care of his 2-year old son in his flat, with the door opened in order to pay attention to the entrance.
Galán went into the flat, said "Hello" to Ledesma, and aimed at him with the Tokarev. He forced him to kneel down, looking at the wall and with his back to him. The superintendent begged for mercy, but the ex-soldier shot him in the nape in front of his son. Galán ignored the child, without giving importance to him, and left the house.
At that moment, Galán was able to know what he felt when killing another person: nothing. At least, nothing bad. No remorse, no fear. But he wanted to do it again.
The fact that Galán didn't consider himself a bad person is curious. He described himself as a good, quiet, and well-mannered man. He was really concerned about being polite, to the point that he always said hello to his victims before killing them, as a sign of good manners. He became surprised at how even a "good person" like him could kill people so easily.
On February 5, at 5 in the morning, Juan Carlos Martín had finished his night shift as a cleaner at the airport, and was waiting for the bus to go home. Alfredo Galán arrived there with his pistol, forcing him to kneel down and shooting him in the nape, like he did with his first victim. At the crime scene, the police officers would find a card from the Spanish deck, the ace of glasses. When the journalists found out about that detail, they immediately baptized the culprit The Deck Killer.
It's thought that this first card was there by chance, and not because the killer put it there. This theory claims that when Galán saw the news about The Deck Killer, he liked the nickname so much that he assumed that signature for his following crimes. Proof of this fact could be that the first card did not have a blue spot on the back, a mark that the killer put on the other cards. This could have be done by Galán in order to let the police know that the cards were his, and not of any copycat killer.
The same day that Galán killed Juan Carlos Martín, he commited another three murders. That evening, he entered a bar called "Rojas", in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid. Inside, he met a woman called Teresa Sánchez, who was the owner of the bar; a boy called Mikel Jiménez, who was the bartender and son of the owner; and a girl, called Juana Uclés, who was using the bar's telephone.
The Deck Killer showed his gun to the bartender for a moment, and then shot him and Juana Uclés in the head. One bullet for each victim being enough to kill both. His training in the army hadn't been in vain.
Teresa Sánchez tried to flee, absolutely terrified, when the killer shot her three times: in her back, arm and leg. Probably he wanted to kill her in a more sadistic way, watching how she bled to death. The woman, almost unconscious, stayed motionless on the floor, hoping that the murderer would believe that she was dead. Her plan worked. Galán left the bar believing that he had just killed another three people, but one of them had survived.
The police found bullet cases on the crime scenes, and the ballistic department was able determine later that all of them were from the same gun. The Tokarev is a extremely rare weapon in Spain, so the police then started to investigate all soldiers who had been stationed in Eastern Europe. Maybe Galán noticed that this could happen, because he wrapped his gun in a net for his next crimes, so he would keep the cases.
On March 7, he decided to hunt another human prey. He went to Tres Cantos, a village near Madrid, where he found a couple from Ecuador: Eduardo Salas and his girlfriend Anahid. The Deck Killer approached them. Salas could see his face clearly, while he didn't notice that he was brandishing a weapon. Galán shot the boy in the face, and then tried to shoot the girl, but his gun jammed. He fled, but first he left a 'two-of-glasses' card on the ground.
Eduardo Salas was put into an hospital, but he survived, and he would be a very important eye witness at the Deck Killer's trial.
On March 17, at night, when Alfredo Galán was searching for his next victim, he bumped into a married couple from Rumania, George and Doina Magda. He shot one bullet in the man's head, and four in the woman's. He left a 'three' and a 'four-of-glasses' at the crime scene.
Later, three bullets would be extracted from Doina Magda's head, after liquifying her brains. They were evidence of the use of the same Tokarev as in the previous crimes.
Despite all the evidence and eye witnesses, on July 3 the Deck Killer was still uncaught, although he had not killed since March. Galán got drunk that day, and then went to the police station of Puertollano and confessed all his crimes. The police officers didn't believe him at first, but when he talked about the blue spots on the back of the cards, a detail that only the police and the killer knew, he was arrested and interrogated.
Alfredo Galán claimed that he confessed because he was fed up with the police not catching him. He also said that he was very comfortable killing, and that he could keep doing so for 20 years more.
The Tokarev was never found. According to Galán, he threw it away in Ciudad Real.
Later, he withdrew all his previous declarations and said that he had sold his gun to two skin heads before the crimes happened, declaring himself innocent. The judge didn't believe his new story: Teresa Sánchez and Eduardo Salas identified him as the shooter.
The psychiatrists who studied Alfredo Galán Sotillos determined that he is a psychopath with narcisist and schizoid features. He was condemned to 142 years in prison.
The most recent famous case of a serial killer in Spain is that of Remedios Sánchez, a 48-year old woman who killed at least 3 old women, and attempted to kill another five. All of this happened in just a month, between June 3 and July 10 of 2006.
Remedios, better known as Reme, was born on July 22 of 1957 in La Coruña, Galicia. She was the youngest of twelve children, a tremendously numerous family who had economic problems. When she was 16 years old, Remedios Sánchez went to Barcelona, escaping from the poverty. There, she found a job as a cook, a profession that she would do for all the following years.
In Barcelona, she got married and had two twin children. 20 years later her husband left her, and the boys decided to go with their father, leaving Remedios alone. This severely undermined her morale, and increased an inferiority complex that she suffered.
Reme was a compulsive gambler, who used to spend all her money in the bingo and the slot machines. Her problems with her self-esteem didn't help her to overcome this problem. Although she made friends during her life, and she became really appreciated among them, she never searched for help, nor recognised her problem. More than that, when talking with her acquaintances, she sometimes bragged about her money and lifestyle, lying to make herself seem like a lucky person. This could be another sign of her inferiority complex.
After the relationship with her husband, she had another two relationships with men. Both of them went bad, and this only increased the psychological problems of Remedios, and the already bad image of herself that she had got even worse.
When the murders happened, Sánchez was working as a cook in a bar called Cebreiro, and owned by a couple from Galicia who greatly appreciated her. In general, the clients who knew her, among which there were several police officers from the nearby station, showed affection to the woman. So, when it was discovered that she was a serial killer, it was a big blow for all her friends, specially to the bar owners, who could not believe the news.
When the killing spree started, Remedios was having financial problems due to her gambling adiction, and because she was going to buy half a flat from her last ex boyfriend, Rafael, to make all the house of hers. Despite this, it doesn't look that to rob the women that she killed was their primary reason. She used to steal money, credit cards, jewels and other objects, but just things which could be seen at first sight, she didn't searched the houses, although she had time. She took several non valuable objects too, which could be some kind of mementos.
The modus operandi of Sánchez consisted in befriending old women in the street (the market, the church...) so she could get into their house with any excuse, like drinking a cup of water or make a telephone call. Inside, she beat the women and then strangled them, usually with objects that she could find at the house, like towels. Then she took several objects from the victim and the house, and left.
Considering that the money was not her main reason for killing, we could only consider that the truth is hidden somewhere in the murderer's mind. According to some psychologists, the strangling method suggests desire of domination, maybe because of her low self-esteem. But the main thing is that, according to the official psychiatric examination, she was a psychopath, without severe mental problems who could disturb her mind.
This psychopath woman, who definitely was not a professional criminal, committed many mistakes during her murdering career, which delivered in the survival of five of her victims. Sometimes, she thought that her victims were dead, but they were just unconsciouss because of the lack of air. In one case, the husband of the victim arrived home, and she had to flee.
In spite of all her clumsiness, three innocent women died, being attacked in the loneliness of their flats by a woman who they just met, but in whom they trusted.
These women were Josefa Cervantes, 83 years old, who died strangled with their crochet table cloth in Juny 10 of 2006; Adelaida Gerenzani, 96, strangled with a towel from her own flat in Juny 28; and María Saún, 76, who died in the same way between July 2 and 3.
The police knew fast that they were searching for a serial killer. Thanks to the identification made by the surviving victims, and to a picture made with a security camera, in which one victim could be seen in company of the criminal, the police knew too that they were looking for a woman. The victims described a scar that the murderer had on her hand, a scar which she got from an accident in the kitchen, where she worked, so it was another useful clue for the investigators.
Finally, Remedios was caught. When her house was being searched, she was playing the slot machine, peacefully, in a bar. The policemen found lots of objects in her house. Some of these objects had been reported to have disappeared from the houses of the victims, so they were definitive evidence. The objects were shown to the living victims and to the relatives of the dead ones, and they identified several of them.
In her trial, Remedios Sánchez stayed quiet at first. She refused to talk with the police, with the psychiatrists, with the judge and even with her lawyer. But the evidence talked, and all the surviving victims identified her without a doubt.
When Remedios decided to talk, she claimed that the crimes were committed by a mysterious woman called "Mari", who had set her a trap and from whom she didn't know even the surname. Of course, the story didn't work.
Counting on that the psychiatric report made her fully imputable, Remedios Sánchez Sánchez was condemned to 144 years of prison.
Here we finish our horrifying trip. I hope you found it interesting.
Let me say goodbye with a little anecdote. During the 70's, in Carabanchel hospital, Manuel Delgado Villegas and José Antonio Rodríguez Vega met each other. They were seen arguing about which of them had killed more people, and who killed in the "best" way.
Nowadays, in the Spanish police academy, the students must still see documentaries about these two criminals, so they can know about the most dangerous Spanish serial killers of the 20th century.
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