Intense sexual desire.
The third capital sin is lust and its definition in the dictionary of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans is too lukewarm to define the aberrations and perversions committed by Juan Carlos Aguilar, better known as the fake Shaolin monk. In June 2013, the Ertzaintza arrested the individual, known in the Basque Country and the rest of Spain for his television appearances, in which he presented himself as the only Shaolin warrior in Europe. In reality he was nothing more than a charlatan, a complex con man who murdered two women and humiliated and tortured several dozen of them he captured at the martial arts school, which he had turned into a center of perversion.
There have been few criminals in the history of Spain as sadistic as Aguilar. A psychopath who never allowed himself to be examined by forensic psychiatrists and who had the audacity to videotape and photograph many of his aberrations. Forensics warned that his first victim had dismembered him alive.
His crime spree came to a halt on June 2, 2013. Around four in the afternoon, a woman called 112 saying that in front of number 12 Máximo Aguirre street in the center of Bilbao, behind a closed gate, a black woman was screaming for help. “Now I see that a person is grabbing him from behind. He’s covering his mouth! Host! He made him come inside with blows!”
It didn’t take three minutes for the first Ertzaintza patrols to appear. It was the Zen Lao gym, frequented by many policemen who also know the owner. The agents forced the gate and entered in the dark, groping, illuminated only by the beam of flashlights and calling the name of the man who, according to a witness, was holding a woman. The silence was sepulchral. After a few minutes of walking around and securing rooms in a large labyrinthine space filled with small rooms on different levels, they found one that had a locked door. On the other side, Aguilar tried to prevent the agents from accessing it.
When they managed to open the door, one of the policemen stepped on the hand of a woman who they later identified as Ada Otuya, the same one who minutes earlier had crawled to the gate to ask for help. The woman lay unconscious on the ground. He was breathing with difficulty. It was tied around the neck with five turns of packing cord, a bridle and several turns of American tape that covered everything. Also, he had shackles on his hands and feet. The young woman died two days later in hospital.
With the suspect in the dungeon, investigators calmly canvassed the gym again to make sure no one else was there. When they arrived at the training mat area, they discovered several small, closed green plastic bags. Inside were human remains.
At that time, the inspection was ordered to be stopped and the scientific police were notified, who remained in there for ten days, with 24-hour shifts in which they managed to carry out more than 10,000 DNA analyses. “That was real madness. There were human remains in all the bags. He had entertained himself to clean the bones from the flesh in some parts. One hand was missing an index finger. The other was not there. At the beginning we also didn’t know how many bodies the remains could correspond to”, recalls Ertzaintza inspector Iñaki Irusta, head of the scientific police.
Sub-officer Hugo Prieto was in charge in those days of the Ertzaintza’s people division which included the homicide group. He was in charge of leading an investigation that brought them face to face with a monster that they had to discover what it had been able to do, in the center of Bilbao, without raising suspicion.
The police went to the suspect’s home. It didn’t take long for the first green plastic bags to appear on the balcony. In one was a hand with the index finger ripped off and breast prostheses. A video camera caught their attention, with the card full of files.
They paled as soon as they began to see the first images recorded with that camera. Next to a woman who appeared to be dead, Aguilar guided another blindfolded and invited her to touch her.
Who was that other woman? Did Aguilar have an accomplice? The memory card of that camera kept dozens of files with recordings and photographs of women whom the detainee watched, tortured and humiliated in sexual practices that went beyond masochism. Images in which they appeared without consciousness.
Anxiety and uncertainty gripped the researchers. They needed to verify who those women were, identify them and check if they were alive. This part ended up being the easiest. The fake monk wrote down all his dates in a kind of diary and noted in a diary the women with whom he had relations. The Basque police were able to speak to all of them and showed them the images. They paled when they saw each other, and understood that the alleged mental powers were not real and that he was putting them to sleep with drugs that he camouflaged in zanages to abuse them.
One of the victims particularly attracted the attention of the police. It was about the woman who appeared stroking the corpse of another while blindfolded. For her, Aguilar had reserved the worst of the treatments, the most humiliating. Woman with a severe physical disability after suffering a stroke, he recorded her eating and drinking her excrement and urine, or hitting her with violence and contempt.
Investigators concluded that there had been two fatalities, Ada Otuya and Jenny Rebollo. The first, a 29-year-old Nigerian, and the second, a 40-year-old Colombian. For the two murders, he was sentenced to 38 years in prison, which he is serving in the Villahierro penitentiary, in León, where he was transferred after suffering an assault by from another intern. He has never shown any remorse for what he did.
