Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
In just ten months, between August 1987 and April 1988, 16 women were raped and murdered in the northern Spanish coastal city of Santander. Since the victims were elderly women ranging in age from 61 to 93, the Spanish media dubbed the serial killer the “Widow Killer.” But who brutally raped these elderly women and then killed them? The Guardia Civil’s investigation led to José Antonio Rodríguez Vega, a convicted sex offender. The handsome Spaniard was a trained mason who had to leave his parents’ home at an early age after he had pushed his terminally ill father, who was confined to a wheelchair, down the stairs. He had developed an affinity for elderly women at an early age. When he was molested by a 50-year-old widow at the age of 8, he began to masturbate compulsively. At age 12, he felt increasingly sexually attracted to his mother. At age 18, against his parents’ wishes, he married Socorro Marcial, a classmate with whom he fathered a child. Just two years later, at age 20, José was arrested for raping two women and attempting to rape three others. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison for this in 1979. In prison, he eagerly wrote letters to his victims, pleading for their pardon, as the Spanish Penal Code at the time allowed for the annulment of the sentence if the victims agreed to it. All but one did so, whereupon José was released after only 8 years in prison. After his release, his wife divorced him. Once free, he married a mentally disabled woman whom he tortured and humiliated. To those around them, José’s marriage to his wife was seen as a true picture-perfect marriage. No one suspected that behind the façade of the devoted husband lurked a monster who observed his victims for days on end to closely study their daily routines. He would then ring the doorbells of elderly women and introduce himself as a handyman; thanks to his well-groomed appearance and impeccable manners, the elderly women would invite him into their homes without hesitation. There, he would rape and then suffocate the women. At first, José was able to murder with impunity, as nothing indicated that the elderly women had not died of natural causes. It was only when signs of external violence were found on 82-year-old Margarita Gonzales and 66-year-old Natividad Robledo that the Guardia Civil began its murder investigation. These led to José, as all the murder victims had his contact information and traces of makeshift masonry work had been found in the apartments. During a search of José’s home, items belonging to the victims were found. José had taken them as souvenirs, which were subsequently identified by the victims’ families as their belongings. During police interrogations, José confessed to the 16 rapes and murders. He recanted this confession during the trial in November 1991. He claimed that all the women had slept with him consensually and had died of cardiac arrest because sex with him had simply been too good. José Antonio Rodríguez Vega was a psychopath who showed no remorse whatsoever throughout the entire trial. He was sentenced to 440 years in prison, although under Spanish law he was only required to serve 30 years. After 10 years in prison, on October 24, 2002, at the age of 44, he was brutally stabbed 113 times by two inmates while taking a walk on the prison grounds. With that, the “widow killer” was finally consigned to history—a man whose sensational series of murders had kept all of Spain in suspense and provided plenty of talking points even in the cosmopolitan capital of Barcelona, in the Spanish region of Catalonia.
