On January 18, 1971, the police of Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz) arrested Manuel Delgado Villegas, 28, as the main suspect in the disappearance of his girlfriend, Antonia Rodríguez Relinque. To the astonishment of the officials, the detainee confessed in detail to the murder of Toñi, but also blamed himself for the death of Francisco Marín, whose body was found dead two weeks earlier. And he didn’t stop there. He claimed to have committed up to 48 murders from 1960 to 1970.
El Arropiero, as the person arrested for selling candy on the street was also known, thus became the most important serial killer in the history of crime in Spain. The psychiatric analyzes to which he was subjected detected that Delgado suffered from all types of dysfunctions, including a genetic anomaly (the XYY chromosome) that drove him to extreme aggressiveness.
Manuel Delgado, together with Inspector Salvador Ortega Mallén and two more police officers, toured the Mediterranean coast to confirm the homicides. Sufficient evidence was found in seven of the cases, in a trip full of anecdotes and surprising good humor.
Arropiero was admitted to the Carabanchel Psychiatric Center without being tried. And there he remained, subjected to electroshocks and forgotten, until the Amnesty Law of 1977 forced his case to be reviewed.
All the rivers of passion flow into the black chronicle: desire, greed, jealousy, anger, hatred, love, greed, ambition… There are no stories only of good guys and bad guys. There are stories full of nuances, half-truths, strengths and weaknesses, innocence and cruelty.
Dossier Negro is a biweekly black chronicle podcast. You can also find its chapters on podcast platforms such as iVoox, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts, among others.
