The 5 best known criminal killers in Spain

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

Either way, there have been absolutely dramatic cases in which a single person has been the perpetrator 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, his actions have transpired in the media and have aroused the interest of multiple experts in Criminal Psychology.

1. Manuel Delgado Villegas, "The Arropiero"

It is possible that Manuel Delgado Villegas - known as "El Arropiero"-He was the greatest murderer in the history of Spain. His nickname, Arropiero, comes from his father selling syrup and he helped her.

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 blow to the front of the neck, just at the height of the nut, 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 even 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 egocentric and megalomaniac, with a total lack of empathy towards his victims. El Arropiero has the record of preventive arrest without legal protection in Spain, becoming pregnant without a lawyer for 6 and a half years.

Due to suffering from an alleged mental illness, he was never tried and his admission to a prison psychiatric hospital was ordered.

El Arropiero died in 1998, a few months after being released.

2. Andrés Rabadán, "The assassin of the crossbow"

Andres Rabadán (Premià de Mar, 1972) he killed his father with a medieval crossbow that he had bought for Reyes. After the murder, he turned himself in to the police, and admitted to being the author of three suburban train derailments, which he carried out a month before killing his father. It was a sabotage that did not cause injuries, but it did cause a lot of fear. He could have been deadly to hundreds of people.

He murdered his father, apparently, over an argument over the temperature of a glass of milk. She killed him with three shots of arrows. Rabadán declared that he loved his father and that he killed him without knowing what he was doing, guided by the voices he heard. Realizing what he had just done, he shot two more arrows at her to end his father's suffering.

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

During the expert tests for the trial, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. By court order, he was admitted to a psychiatric penitentiary after 20 years of confinement. According to the forensics, said mental illness was not enough to not be aware of his actions while he manipulated the train tracks, but it was during the commission of the patricide.

There are still many speculations today about whether Andrés Rabadán poses a danger to society or whether he is socially rehabilitated: some professionals claim that he feigned mental illness in order to be unimpeachable for a parricide conviction, and others claim that he is a narcissistic psychopath who He knew what he was doing at all times, and that currently his self-esteem is sustained through the artistic and literary creations that he made since prison.

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

3. Alfredo Galán, "The assassin of the deck"

Alfredo Galán Sotillo, known as the "deck killer", put the entire Spanish society on edge in 2003. It 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 attacks, something not very common in people with a psychopathic profile.

He killed his victims with a very powerful weapon, a Yugoslav Tokarev pistol, which he carried with him to Spain since his military passage through Bosnia. He began killing in February 2003, and his first victim was a 28-year-old. Next to his victims he left a playing card, the ace of cups, which became his “signature” and he became known as “the assassin of the deck”.

According to a witness who testified at the trial, the murderer of the deck always said good morning to his victims, and then asked them "please" to kneel. He then proceeded with the shot. He did it that way because according to him, "education comes first in life."

In 2003, Alfredo Galán broke into a national police station while drunk and confessed to being the murderer of the deck. He was sentenced to 140 years in prison for 6 murders and three attempted murders, although following the sentences applied according to Spanish criminal laws, he would only get to serve 25 years of sentence.

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

4. Javier Rosado, "The crime of the role"

In 1994 a 22-year-old Chemistry student, Javier Rosado, and a 17-year-old student, Félix Martínez, murdered Carlos Moreno by stabbing him 20, a 52-year-old cleaning worker who was returning to his house at night by bus.

Javier Rosado invented a very macabre role-playing game called "Razas", and convinced his friend Felix of him to follow the instructions that he himself devised.

The big mistake that the inducing murderer made was to collect everything that happened that morning in a personal diary, which the police seized during the inspection of his home. Rosado decided to be the first of the two who would 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 it was very healthy), an old man or a a child (…) ”,“ if she had been a female she would now be dead, but at that time we continued with the limitation of not being able to kill more than to women".

He openly acknowledged that they wanted to kill without previously knowing the victim, as this was established by the rules set by himself: “our The best trick is that we did not know the victim at all at all, nor the place (at least I) nor did we have any real reason to do something to him (…)”; “Poor man, he didn't deserve what happened to him. It was a disgrace, since we were looking for teenagers, and not poor 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 be obeyed. The following extract from the diary shows the null empathy and contempt towards the victim, and even a sadistic component in his way of proceeding: “I put my right hand around his neck in an exploration task that he hoped would end up causing the death. Oh no! That guy was immortal ”,“ (…) making him bleed like the pig that he was. It had pissed me off quite a bit ", how long it takes for an idiot to die!" "How disgusting man!"

It didn't take long for the media to give role-playing games negative sensational connotations that fueled criminal actions.

Javier Rosado was sentenced to 42 years in prison, and the third degree was granted in 2008. During his stay in prison it can be affirmed that he took advantage of the time, since he graduated in Chemistry, Mathematics and Computer Technical Engineering.

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

Joan Vila Dilme, caretaker of a nursing home in Gironahim, he was sentenced to 127 years in prison for murdering 11 elderly people of the residence in which he worked between 2009 and 2010. He poisoned the elderly with cocktails of barbiturates, insulin, and caustic products, causing them to die.

At first, the Olot guard alleged that he thought that in this way she was "helping" her victims to rest and stop suffering, they made him feel sorry for them and he wanted to give them "fullness." He was convinced that he was doing good, since 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 especially cruel and painful for the victims) he felt very guilty.

According to him, for years she had been taking many psychotropic drugs because she was diagnosed with an obsessive disorder compulsive with depressive episodes, and he tended to drink alcohol simultaneously on his job.

Later, the expert psychologists and psychiatrists who examined him argued that with his crimes he sought power and satisfaction that it gave him control of the passage from life to death, as a kind of God, and that he was aware of his actions in everything moment. One of the most powerful sources of suffering and anxiety for Joan Vila was that she always felt a woman locked in a man's body, and she lived it secretly until she committed the 11 murders.

The final conviction proved that in the 11 crimes Joan Vila had the objective of killing and that he acted without the elders being able to defend themselves. In addition, it highlights that in three of the eleven cases there was cruelty, because it unnecessarily and deliberately increased the suffering of the victims. The Olot guard was not considered to have any psychological problem that affected his cognitive and / or volitional abilities, and he is currently serving his sentence in a Catalan prison.