Spain’s 5 most notorious criminal killers

Several serial killers shocked the country with their terrible crimes.

If there is a morally reprehensible act in our society, it is that of taking the life of another person. The reasons why some people are capable of committing an act of this magnitude are not only studied from Forensic Psychology, but from multiple social sciences.

Be that as it may, there have been absolutely dramatic cases in which a single person has been the architect of brutal murders that have shocked an entire country..

Notorious criminal killers

In this article we are going to review the most dangerous criminal killers of the last decades in Spain.. For one reason or another, their acts have transcended in the media and have aroused the interest of many experts in Criminal Psychology.

1. Manuel Delgado Villegas, "El Arropiero".

Manuel Delgado Villegas - known as "El Arropiero" - may have been the greatest murderer in the history of Spain. His nickname, Arropiero, comes from the fact that his father sold rice and he helped him.

This man confessed to the murder of 47 people, committed between 1964 and 1971, among the victims was his partner. According to the investigators of the case, he practiced necrophilia with some of his victims.

His modus operandi was a deadly karate chop on the front of the neck, just at the level of the walnut, which he learned in the Legion.. Other times he used blunt objects, such as bricks, or bladed weapons. Some of his victims were strangled to death. It was said that the choice of his victims was totally random and indiscriminate, without any planning.

It seems that he showed no remorse for his actions; the investigators of the case labeled him as egocentric and megalomaniac, with a total lack of empathy towards his victims. El Arropiero holds the record of preventive arrest without legal protection in Spain, being pre****so without a lawyer for 6 and a half years.

Due to his alleged mental illness, he was never tried and was ordered to be admitted to a penitentiary psychiatric hospital.

El Arropiero died in 1998a few months after his release from prison.

2. Andrés Rabadán, "The crossbow murderer".

Andrés Rabadán (Premià de Mar, 1972) killed his father with a medieval crossbow he had bought for Epiphany.. After the murder, he turned himself in to the police, and admitted being the author of three derailments of commuter trains, which he did a month before killing his father. It was a sabotage that did not result in injuries, but did generate a lot of fear. It could have been deadly for hundreds of people.

He killed his father, apparently, over an argument about the temperature of a glass of milk. He killed him with three arrow shots. Rabadán stated that he loved his father and that he killed him without knowing what he was doing, guided by the voices he heard. When he became aware of what he had just done, he shot him with two more arrows to end his father's suffering.

It seems that Andrés Rabadán's childhood was not an easy one, as he had to deal with his mother's suicide and the fact that he was left alone for a long time. and the fact of being alone for a long time with his father, without his siblings or friends.

During the expert evidence for the trial, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. By court order, he was committed to a psychiatric prison for 20 years. According to the forensic experts, this mental illness was not enough to make him unaware of his actions while he was manipulating the train tracks, but it was enough during the commission of the parricide.

There is still much speculation today as to whether Andrés Rabadán is a danger to society or whether he is socially rehabilitated: some professionals claim that he faked the mental illness in order to be unimputable for the parricide conviction, and others argue that he is a narcissistic psychopath who knew what he was doing at all times, and that his self-esteem is currently sustained through the artistic and literary creations he made from prison.

In 2012 he served the maximum time he could remain incarcerated, and is allowed scheduled and controlled releases.

3. Alfredo Galán, "The murderer of the deck of cards".

Alfredo Galán Sotillo, known as the "deck of cards killer", put Spanish society on edge in 2003. He is one of the most dangerous serial killers that have circulated in Spain.

He belonged to the Spanish Army from 2000 to 2004, so he had military skills. Curiously, it seems that he had a tendency to suffer from anxiety crises, something not very common in people with a psychopathic profile.

He killed his victims with a very powerful weapon, a Yugoslavian Tokarev pistol, which he brought with him to Spain from his military stay in Bosnia. He started killing in February 2003, and his first victim was a young man of 28 years old. Next to his victims he left a playing card, the Ace of Cups, which became his "signature" and became known as "the deck of cards killer".

According to a witness who testified at the trial, the deck of cards killer always said good morning to his victims, and then asked them to "please" get down on their knees.. He would then proceed with the shooting. He did this because, according to him, "education comes first in life".

In 2003, Alfredo Galán burst into a national police station while drunk and confessed to being the "deck of cards killer". He was sentenced to 140 years in prison for six murders and three attempted murders, although according to the sentences applied under Spanish criminal law, he would only serve 25 years.

The conviction did not recognize the existence of any psychiatric pathology in the murderer of the deck of cards, so he was fully aware of his actions and carried them out with planning.

4. Javier Rosado, "El crimen del rol" ("The crime of the role")

In 1994, a 22-year-old chemistry student, Javier Rosado, and a 17-year-old student, Felix Martinez, murdered Carlos Moreno by stabbing him 20 times, a 52-year-old janitor who was returning home at night by bus.

Javier Rosado invented a macabre role-playing game called "Razas", and convinced his friend Félix Martinez to play it.and convinced his friend Felix to follow the instructions he had devised.

The big mistake the killer-inducer made was to record everything that happened that morning in a personal diary, which the police seized during the inspection of his home. Rosado proposed to be the first of the two to kill a victim, and it had to be a woman: "I would be the one to kill the first victim", "It was preferable to catch a woman, young and pretty (the latter was not essential, but very healthy), than an old man or a child (...)", "if she had been female she would be dead now, but at that time we still had the limitation of only being able to kill women".

He openly acknowledged that they wanted to kill without knowing the victim beforehand, since this was established by the rules set by himself: "our best asset is that we knew absolutely nothing about the victim, nor the place (at least I did) nor did we have any real reason to do anything to him (...)"; "poor man, he didn't deserve what happened to him. It was a disgrace, since we were looking for teenagers, not poor hard-working workers".

During the trial it was stated that Javier Rosado had a cold and calculating mind, that he lacked remorse and empathy, and that he fit the profile of a psychopath who liked to feel admired and to be obeyed. The following excerpt from the diary shows the lack of empathy and contempt for the victim, and even a sadistic component in his way of proceeding: "I put my right hand through his neck in an exploration that I hoped would end up causing his death. No way, that guy was immortal", "(...) making him bleed like the pig he was. He had really pissed me off", "how long it takes for an idiot to die", "what a disgusting guy".

The media were quick to give the role-playing games negative sensationalist connotations that fueled criminal actions.

Javier Rosado was sentenced to 42 years in prison, and was granted third degree in 2008. During his stay in prison, it can be said that he made the most of his time, as he graduated in Chemistry, Mathematics and Computer Engineering.

5. Joan Vila Dilme, "The warden of Olot".

Joan Vila Dilme, caretaker of a geriatric home in Girona.was sentenced to 127 years in prison for murdering 11 elderly people in the residence where he worked between 2009 and 2010. He poisoned the elderly with cocktails of barbiturates, insulin, and caustic products, causing their death.

Initially, the Olot warden claimed that he thought that in this way he was "helping" his victims to rest and stop suffering, he felt sorry for them and wanted to give them "fullness". He was convinced that he was doing good, as he could not bear to see the conditions in which his victims lived. When he became aware of what he had done and the method he had used (ingestion of abrasive substances, something particularly cruel and painful for the victims), he felt very guilty.

According to him, he had been taking a lot of psychotropic drugs for years because he was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder with depressive episodes, and he tended to drink alcohol at the same time during his work shifts.

Later, the expert psychologists and psychiatrists who examined him argued that with his crimes he sought the power and satisfaction that came from controlling the passage from life to death, like a kind of God, and that he was conscious of his actions at all times. One of the most powerful sources of suffering and anxiety for Joan Vila was that she always felt she was a woman enclosed in a man's body, and she lived it with secrecy until she committed the 11 murders.

The final conviction proved that in the 11 crimes Joan Vila had the objective to kill and that he acted without the elderly people being able to defend themselves.. In addition, it highlights that in three of the eleven cases there was overkill, as he unnecessarily and deliberately increased the suffering of the victims. The Olot orderly was not considered to have any psychological problem affecting his cognitive and/or volitional capacities, and is currently serving his sentence in a Catalan prison.