This text belongs to ‘Dossier Negro’, a newsletter inspired by the podcast of the same name, which Enrique Figueredo will send on Wednesdays on a biweekly basis. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
World criminal history has given a subtype of criminal that could be labeled as a hermit or mountaineer criminal. They commit misdeeds, sometimes bloody acts, even fatal ones, and then they take refuge in mountains and forests and survive there, evading police persecution. They take advantage of natural features such as caves or ledges to hide, or old abandoned buildings, such as shepherds’ shelters or coal bunkers. They are temporarily installed there. They are never in the same hiding place for long. Pedro Lozano, better known as Rambo de Requena, is a good example of this type of fugitives. We tell it in Dossier Negro. He inherited the nickname from the fictional character John Rambo, played by actor Sylvester Stallone for the first time in 1982.
There was a much more dangerous antecedent to Rambo de Requena. He was known as Igor the Russian, despite being Serbian. He had been fleeing Italy on foot and by bicycle. He was also hidden in the mountains, in this case he ended his criminal career in Teruel. There he killed a rancher and two civil guards. Recently, the Supreme Court confirmed the permanent reviewable prison for the criminal.
Rural demons. The Izquierdo brothers committed a massacre in 1990 that made the Extremaduran town of Puerto Hurraco known forever. After perpetrating the massacre, they fled and hid in the nearby fields of the Sierra de la Serena. The Civil Guard carried out raids until they found them and arrested them. None of them, nor the sisters, supposed inducers, are still alive.
The evil eye. Josep Marimón is considered the greatest Spanish mass murderer. He committed his crimes in 1928, in Pobla de Ferran, a small town in Tarragona. He killed eight children, three women and a young man in a single criminal attack. He believed that someone in the village had bewitched him. He escaped to the mountains. The somatenes found him and Marimón ended up dead from a shot in the eye.
Barcelona mountain range. Manuel Brito and Francisco Javier Picatoste escaped from Lleida prison in 2001 after shooting and seriously wounding the police officers who were guarding them during a hospital transfer. They approached Barcelona and hid in the mountains that surround the city: Collserola. There they killed a young man and repeatedly raped his girlfriend.
Fiction and reality. The character of John Rambo was that of a misfit veteran of the Vietnam War who faced the entire police force of a ruthless sheriff after hiding in some lush forests. He gave way to a long series of films, the last of which was in 2019. The original, the one that created the fictional myth that later served to baptize real criminals, was released several decades earlier. It can be seen today on Movistar.
