cover of episode Manuel Delgado Villegas | El Arropiero

Manuel Delgado Villegas | El Arropiero

2020/1/6
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The episode introduces Manuel Delgado Villegas, a Spanish serial killer known as El Arropiero, suspected of over 40 murders. The host discusses his fame in Spain and the skepticism surrounding his confessions.

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Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?

So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes per detail. 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 Vyborg 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 a time, they limited his probable crimes to a more plausible list of only twenty-two, of which they came to prove seven. But the killer known as El Aropiero gave so many precise details of his crimes—some committed outside his home 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 ad-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.

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If you join the TSK $10 Plus Club, you get access to 100% exclusive bonus episodes where I go into detail in other dark areas of human behavior. 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 thirteen. 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 Aropiero 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 Aropiero, and then he stayed with the nickname of simply El Aropiero for the rest of his life. Although he went to school, he could not read or write.

At the age of eighteen 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 Antonio Rodriguez Relinque, with whom he had had a romantic relationship.

El Aropiero 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 Folch 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 Hélène Boudry was a beautiful young 21-year-old French woman, 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 Aropiero had been loitering 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 Venazio Hernandez Carrasco, who was found dead in the waters of Tajunia 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.

Venazio 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 Generalissimo. They found the owner, Ramon Estrada Saldrich, unconscious, but still alive. He later died in the hospital.

El Aropiero had met him in a bar, and soon Saldrich offered to pay for El Aropiero'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 Aropiero 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 Aropiero committed, the fifth is the most depraved. The victim was a 68-year-old woman, Anastasia Borellia Moreno, a small elderly woman who worked in the kitchen of the Iruru bar in Mataró. She was only 1 m and 40 cm tall, weighing only 40 kg.

On the 23rd of November, 1969, she left on her way home, but never arrived. Four days later, children playing in the Riera Serena tunnel, about 300 meters from Anastasia's home, found the body. It was covered with a plastic, face up, with the clothes pulled up. El Aropiero had hit her head with a brick until she died.

"'Viegas 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 streambed. "'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 Mataro 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 Aropiero. His name was Francisco Marin Ramirez. He was 24 years old, he was from Cordoba, and he lived in the same street as Antonia Rodriguez, 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 Aropiero 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 Viegas, the boy again suggested oral sex, so he threw the boy over a bridge into the water below.

According to Vegas himself, he did go look for the boy immediately afterwards, but his feet sank in the deep mud, so he turned around and left. When the body of the boy later was found by authorities, an autopsy showed that the strikes 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

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Following the disappearance of Antonia Toni Rodriguez 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, where he was questioned by Cadiz's criminal investigation division over the disappearance of the person whom they 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 Galvezito, 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 Strangler, 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 Arupiero'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 Villegas 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 Villegas 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 Aropiero, 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 Aropiero.

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 Torrejón airbase, since the victim had often been seen in such company. The crime, however, remains unsolved and was never officially linked to El Aropiero by the police. Delgado Viegas himself claimed to also having killed a foreign woman in St. Felu, the 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 Aruquero, "'after the man said, and I quote, "'Such beauty, such a view, "'I wouldn't mind dying right in this place,'

to which Delgado Villegas replied, "'Die then,' and pushed him off the cliff. Manuel Delgado Villegas 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 XYY chromosome was detected, at a time thought to be a signifier of crime. However, the link between XYY 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 Villegas 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 Fontcalent, 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 tempospatial disorientation, as well as strong autistic symptoms, which isolated him from the world around him. El Aropiero, 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 21 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 Villegas died on the 2nd of February, 1998, at the Hospital Canruti in Badalona.

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 fourteen years locked away in various psychiatric hospitals before his release. He was never legally convicted for his crimes.

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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. This podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons who pledge their hard-earned money every month.

There are especially a few of those patrons I would like to thank in person. These patrons are my 17 most loyal to the Serial Killer podcast. Many of them have contributed for at least the last 45 episodes, and their names are...

You really helped produce this show and you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.

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Thank you. Good night, and good luck.