Saturday, July 22. In other words, today is the day that Joaquín Ferrándiz, the man who murdered five women and tried to kill another two in Castellón between 1995 and 1998 and was sentenced to 69 years in prison, will be released from prison after having served the maximum of 25 years allowed by law.
The inmate, who is currently 60 years old, has served a sentence in the center of Herrera de la Mancha (Ciudad Real), and will be prohibited from going to or residing in the three towns where he committed the crimes (Castelló de la Plana, Benicàssim and Onda) until July 2028, since that is how the sentence includes it.
In recent years, he has been welcomed by a religious entity and has enjoyed prison permits, so the release process has been progressive, judicial sources have reported.
Before the five crimes and other attempts, for which he was sentenced to 69 years, Ferrándiz was sentenced in May 1990 to 14 years in prison for rape, but on April 4, 1995 he was released on parole. Months later, between July of that year and July 1998, he murdered five young women and tried to kill two others.
This serial killer had shown good behavior and had participated in studies and even in literary and cultural contests and was “totally reinserted”, in the opinion of the members of the follow-up commission that granted him parole.
This was one of the reasons that led the prosecutor in the case to request that the State be considered as subsidiary civil liability, for not having sufficiently controlled the defendant, although his request was finally not admitted.
In 1990, the defendant was not detected to have any psychic abnormality, neither by the prison psychologist nor by the forensic doctors or the psychiatrist who intervened as experts in the trial of that case.
Nor was he considered a psychopath in the subsequent trial for the five crimes, because “when the events occurred he suffered from a polymorphous personality disorder”, but that “did not prevent him from governing himself”.
Ferrándiz was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the murder of English teacher Sonia Rubio, and 11 each for the murders of Natalia Archelós, Francisca Salas, Mercedes Vélez and Amelia Sandra García. The Second Section of the Provincial Court of Castellón applied the mitigation of confession in these cases and valued the collaboration provided by the defendant in clarifying the crimes.
In addition, he was sentenced to 9 years in prison for attempting to murder the young Lidia M. and to seven weekend arrests and payment of compensation to Silvia B. for reckless injury.
This murderer used to stalk his victims on the outskirts of nightclubs and even deflated the car tire of one of them to offer help later, since most of the victims voluntarily got into their vehicle, as determined in the subsequent investigation.
