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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast, the podcast dedicated to serial killers. Episode 111. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Laborg Thun.
Happy New Year, dear listener. We are now in the first week of the new decade, the Roaring Twenties. Imagine, it's 100 years since the 1920s started. Time truly flies, like Bukowski said, like wild horses running over the hills.
We start the New Year of 2020 with an episode of a very famous serial killer. That is, he is very famous in his native country. In the rest of the world, few people have heard of him. He is known simply as El Aropiero, and he is suspected of having killed as many as 48 human beings.
So, put on sunscreen, pack your bags, and join me in traveling to sunny Spain. There, we meet a man who has confessed to so many crimes to the police, that the agents in charge of the case believed they were facing a pathological liar. So, at the time, they limited his probable crimes to a more plausible list of only 22, of which they came to prove 7. But, the killer known as El Aropiero gave so many precise details of his crimes, some committed outside his own country of Spain, that his lawyer always believed that his client was, without a doubt, and here I quote, the greatest murderer in history.
I, dear listener, do not believe for a second that Manuel Delgado Villegas was the most prolific serial killer in history. He might, however, be the most prolific Spanish serial killer. Enjoy. This episode is 100% sponsored and free.
In order for me to be able to produce content, I am thus 100% dependent on my dear patrons, who contribute to the show every month on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. This show has, as of now, 78 patrons. I am deeply grateful to each and every one of them. However, I really do wish more of my approximately 1 million unique listeners would help produce the show.
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For example, there are now two episodes on torture, an expose on the death penalty, a feature regarding Norway's most famous Satanist, and a very special version of the song Monster Mash. So head on over to patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast to get access now. Manuel Delgado Villegas was born in Seville on the 25th of January, 1943. His mother, who was then 24 years old, died giving birth.
So his grandmother raised him and his only sister, Joaquina. He and his sister also often stayed with other relatives around the region of Andalusia. All of them abused him in various ways, usually by beating him. This was probably due to a combination of two things.
He had a severe developmental disability from birth, and he showed sexual interest in boys as well as girls from the age of 13. As an adolescent, he started early on to show violent tendencies as well as extreme promiscuity. He frequented prostitutes, both male and female, from early on, and he had a very rare condition called anaspermatism, which earned him some renown among this community. The condition results in him never being able to ejaculate, only ever reaching a state of near orgasm.
He could also maintain an erection for hours, and it is reported that he had a very large penis. These factors also, the fact that he could perform intercourses over and over, made him popular among sex customers and his other various sexual partners as well. El Aroquiero owes his nickname to his absent father, selling homemade sweets made with a sweet blackish thick liquid made out of figs, known as Arope. At first he was simply known as the son of the Aroquiero, and then he stayed with the nickname of simply El Aroquiero for the rest of his life.
Although he went to school, he could not read or write. At the age of 18, he entered the Spanish military legion as a volunteer, where he learned one of the deadly blows, that of the open hand on the neck, with which he ended many of his victims' lives. After deserting, he undertook a long walkabout through Spain, Italy, and France. There he was active begging, stealing, and selling sex.
And of course, he left his path, sewn with corpses. He was finally arrested on the 18th of January, 1971, in the port of Santa Maria, Cadiz, for the death of Antonia Rodriguez Relinque, with whom he had had a romantic relationship. El Aroquiero committed the first of his murders in Catalonia, on the 21st of January, 1964, on the beach of Llorach. He approached a sleeping man leaning on a wall, 49-year-old chef, Adolfo Falk Montaner, and shattered his skull with a stone.
Then he stole the man's money, wallet, and watch. According to Villegas, the wallet had almost no money in it, and the watch was, quote-unquote, crap. Margaret's Helene Boudry was a beautiful young 21-year-old Frenchwoman, and she had just thrown out her would-be lover and was sleeping alone in her bed in Can Planas, a country house in Ibiza. El Aroquiero had been lightning around the area and happened to break in, looking for valuables to steal.
When he saw the beautiful woman sleeping naked on the bed, he raped her, and then strangled her to death. After she was dead, he continued to rape her, and finished by stabbing a knife into her back. Then he simply left. The woman's American boyfriend, the one who had gotten thrown out, later realized he had forgotten his glasses and wallet at the woman's house.
He found his by then dead lover, got scared, and ran away. When police later discovered the body on the 20th of June, 1967, her body was completely naked, and she had a heavy blow to one eye, as well as bruises and scratches on her neck. There was also a knife in her back. The police soon deduced that the American named Jules Morton was her lover and they arrested him.
Morton spent over a year in jail before his innocence was proven and he was released. The third murder that was confessed to and forensically proven was that of Venatio Hernandez-Carrasco, who was found dead in the waters of Tajuna. On the 20th of July, 1968, he had gone to work in a vineyard of his property on the banks of the river when he met Delgado Villegas, who asked him for something to eat. Venatio replied that if he wanted to eat, a young man such as him had to work.
This offended Delgado Villegas, who attacked his victim with the aforementioned legionary coup blow and threw Carrasco into the river. Until the confession of Villegas, everyone had believed that he had drowned by accident. The fourth murder was discovered in Barcelona, early on the 5th of April, 1969, by the cleaners of a furniture store on Avenida del Generalismo. They found the owner, Ramon Estrada Saldrich, unconscious but still alive.
He later died in the hospital. El Arupiero had met him in a bar and soon Saldrich offered to pay for El Arupiero's sexual services. On the night of the crime, Delgado Villegas asked for more money than they had originally agreed upon, and Estrada refused to give them. In response, El Arupiero hit him in the neck, as he used to do with his victims.
Then he tore off the leg of a chair and used it to bludgeon Saldrich repeatedly. From the number of blows he gave, the body was absolutely unidentifiable. In the end, he shoved the leg of the chair up his victim's anus, stole his rings, wallet, and money, and left. At the time of the crime discovery, it shocked the local community with its raw brutality.
Of the murders we know El Arupiero committed, the fifth is the most depraved. The victim was a 68-year-old woman, Anastasia Borrella Moreno, a small elderly woman who worked in the kitchen of the Iruru Bar in Mataró. She was only 1 meters and 40 centimeters tall, weighing only 40 kilos. On the 23rd of November, 1969, she left on her way home, but never arrived.
Four days later, children playing in the Riera Sirena Tunnel, about 300 meters from Anastasia's home, found the body. It was covered with a plastic, placed up with the clothes pulled up. El Arupiero had hit her head with a brick until she died. Villegas explained later to police that he had wanted a woman.
When he met Anastasia, he asked if she wanted to have sex with him. Anastasia reacted indignantly and threatened to notify the police. This enraged him, and he killed her and threw her into a dry stream bed. However, the corpse could be seen from above, so he went down to hide it in a tunnel.
Down in the dark, alone with the corpse, he felt excited and abused the corpse sexually. This act of necrophilia repeated every subsequent night until the body was found and at the time, no one knew who the killer was. After leaving the Mataró and the corpse of Ms. Moreno behind, the killer now moved to the port of Santa Maria in Cadiz.
There, the sixth recognized crime took place on the 3rd of December, 1970, and the victim was a friend of El Arupiero. His name was Francisco Marin Ramírez. He was 24 years old, he was from Cordoba, and he lived in the same street as Antonia Rodríguez, the criminal's girlfriend. According to Delgado Villegas, he went with Francisco on a motorcycle when, in the middle of the road, the boy wanted him to give him a blowjob and offered to perform it on El Arupiero in return.
If there was one thing that made Villegas get extremely angry, it was being asked to give a blowjob or canilingus. He considered these acts to be unnatural. He stopped the motorcycle and dealt his famous blow to the neck of the boy. The boy lost his breath and asked him to take him to the river so he could cool off and recover.
There, according to Villegas, the boy again suggested oral sex, so he threw the boy over a bridge into the water below. According to Villegas himself, he did go look for the boy immediately afterwards, but his feet sank in a deep mud, so he turned around and left. When the body of the boy later was found by authorities, an autopsy showed that a strike to his neck had caused him to die. This means that the boy had survived the fall from the bridge, but had been too weak to get out of the river and had thus slowly succumbed to his injuries.
While every other channel is fighting for your customers' attention, podcasts are where they've already given it. No one accidentally listens to a podcast for 45 minutes. They choose to be here. They trust the voice in their ears, and when that voice talks about your brand, it doesn't sound like advertising.
It sounds like a recommendation from a friend. ACAST gives you that trust at scale. Digital precision, post-read authenticity, and performance data that proves it worked. Don't fight for attention.
Buy it with ACAST. Learn more by Disneyacast.com slash advertise. Following the disappearance of Antonia Tomiro-Duegas Relinque, a 38-year-old intellectually disabled woman who had been seen on various occasions in the company of Delgado Villegas, the police took him to El Puerto de Santa Maria Police Station, who he now knew to be his girlfriend. He initially denied killing her, but following the discovery of her body in a secluded spot known as Pago Galvisito on the outskirts of El Puerto de Santa Maria, on the 21st of February, 1971, he confessed to her murder.
Delgado Villegas confessed that he had strangled the woman with her own tights while they were having sex. The local newspaper, the Diario de Cadiz, dubbed him El Estrangulador del Puerto, translated as The Puerto Strander, though this nickname was dropped later at the request of El Puerto's local authorities, who feared the town's name would be tainted. The murder of his girlfriend was the last of El Arruquero's misdeeds. He had a very characteristic appearance at the time of his arrest.
He was stocky and athletic, and he had an unmistakable cantinflas moustache in homage to one of his idols at the time. The moustache is quite distinctive as it consists of two separate areas of facial growth beneath the nose over each end of the mouth. Over the next few days, he admitted his guilt in the murders of four others and was considered the definite perpetrator of seven murders in total, including two that had been originally considered accidents. During the interrogations, he stunned the police with the story of his crimes.
While under... interrogation, Delgado Viegas remained calm and shared many details of the crimes with the police. He claimed a total of 48 murders across Europe from Paris to Italy. In the process of investigating the veracity of his claims, the investigating magistrate of El Puerto de Santa Maria, Conrado Gallardo Ross, along with detectives involved in the cases, accompanied Delgado Viegas to the scenes of the crimes over a period of two years where he re-enacted and explained the crimes.
One detective in particular, Salvador Ortega, succeeded in gaining Delgado Viegas trust and was the one who was given the most information. Photos taken during the investigation showed Delgado Viegas smiling and even embracing the detectives who used the affectionate form of his name, Manolo or even Manolito. Spanish authorities have never confirmed more than seven murders committed by El Arupiero, even though he confessed to a total of 48. As noted earlier, they suspect he is lying and this is by all means likely.
However, several murders are quite plausibly committed by El Arupiero. Natividad Romero Rodriguez was a prostitute found dead in a large clay jar in a country house near Barajas, Madrid, in 1969. She had been raped and strangled with great violence by a man using only one hand, three days before, leading the investigators to suspect someone with a military background, possibly an American pilot from the nearby Torajón airbase, since the victim had often been seen in such company. The crime, however, remains unsolved and was never officially linked to El Arupiero by the police.
Delgado Viegas himself claimed to also having killed a foreign woman in Saint Felu de Guixol, stabbed another woman in Alicante, strangled a homosexual man with a wire in Barcelona, and even to have thrown another homosexual, a client he had sold sex to, off a cliff in Garaf. This latest event happened according to El Arupiero, after the man said, and I quote, such beauty, such of you, I wouldn't mind dying right in this place. To which Delgado Viegas replied, die then, and pushed him off the cliff. Manuel Delgado Viegas did not have a defense lawyer until six and a half years after being arrested.
This is the longest preventive detention without legal protection in Spain's modern history. He was also the first criminal who was taken by plane in Spain to verify the truthfulness of his shocking stories. In medical tests, the XY chromosome was detected, at a time thought to be a signifier of crime. However, the link between XY syndrome and violent behavior has been disproven by modern studies of the condition.
When a serious psychiatric illness was detected, he was declared lacking criminal responsibility. At this point the investigation was stopped, and in 1978 the National Court ordered that Delgado Viegas be put in a mental institution without trial or a criminal conviction. He spent a lot of time in Carabanchel, located in Madrid, and in Font Calente, located in Alicante. Towards the end of his life he spent a few years in the psychiatric hospital of Santa Coloma de Gramanet, located in Barcelona.
As a psychiatric patient he functioned with ups and downs in his schizophrenia, which was complemented with megalomaniac delirium and tempo-spatial disorientation, as well as strong autistic symptoms, which isolated him from the world around him. El Arupiero, in his later years, was a very unique looking man, with a huge beard and long hair, as if he were the Robinson Crusoe of the psychiatric hospital. The progress of his severe mental illness made it very difficult in later years to have a coherent conversation with him. In 1992, a court ruled that any further incarceration after twenty-one years locked away would be against Delgado Viegas' human rights.
So he was released. El Arupiero was by then severely reduced, and spent his days mumbling and shuffling along the streets of Mataró, begging for small change. Manuel Delgado Viegas died on the 2nd of February 1998 at the hospital Canruti in Batalona. The lung disease that finally killed him was due to tobacco, since he spent the long years of seclusion smoking one cigarette after another, devouring packs, until developing a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
In total, he had spent 14 years locked away in various psychiatric hospitals before his release. He was never legally convicted for his crimes. While every other channel is fighting for your customers' attention, podcasts are where they've already given it. No one accidentally listens to a podcast for 45 minutes.
They choose to be here. They trust the voice in their ears, and when that voice talks about your brand, it doesn't sound like advertising. It sounds like a recommendation from a friend. Acast gives you that trust at scale.
Digital precision, post-read authenticity, and performance data that proves it worked. Don't fight for attention. Buy it with Acast. Learn more by disneyacast.com slash advertise.
And so it is that we come to the end of the first episode of the year 2020. I hope you enjoyed listening to me telling it to you. When I release my next episode, 112 in number, I will present to you something new. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.
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If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillerpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit, theskpodcast. Thank you, good night, and good luck. Thank you, good night, and good night.