Manuel Delgado Villegas

Manuel Delgado Villegas, better known as El Arropiero (Seville, January 25, 1943 - Badalona, February 2, 1998), was a serial killer Spanish. He is considered the worst murderer in Spanish criminal history. He was a psychopath who, when he had his normal life, behaved in a childish way, but when he killed he became a ruthless man, without scruples and without even caring that the victim suffered.

Biography

His father was dedicated to selling rice and he helped him, from there he received his alias: the Arropiero. His mother died giving birth in 1943, so he and his sister were raised by his grandmother. He attended school, but did not learn to read or write.

In 1961 he joined the Spanish Legion, where he learned a deadly blow that helped him in his criminal career. Shortly thereafter he deserted from the army and traveled through Spain, Italy and France, leaving behind a trail of corpses. He was arrested on January 18, 1971 in Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz).

Murders

After his arrest he confessed to so many crimes that at first the police did not take them seriously: forty-eight murders. They managed to prove seven, although the police considered it plausible that he was the author of twenty-two murders, which in some cases included necrophilia.

• January 21, 1964: death of Adolfo Folch Muntaner on the beach of Llorach.
• June 20, 1967: death of Margaret Helene Boudrie in a farmhouse in Ibiza.
• July 20, 1968: death of Venancio Hernández Carrasco in the Tajuña River.
• April 5, 1969: the death of Ramón Estrada Saldrich in Barcelona.
• November 23, 1969: death of Anastasia Borrella Moreno in Mataró.
• January 18, 1971: death of Antonia Rodríguez Relinque in the Port of Santa Maria.

The disappearance of his latest victim, Antonia Rodríguez Relinque, intellectually disabled, who had been seen several times in the company of Manuel Delgado Villegas, with whom she had a sentimental relationship, put the police on the trail of the greatest murderer in history from Spain.

Without suspecting anything, the police accompanied him to the police station where he was questioned about the disappearance of what he considered to be his partner. He stated that he had strangled her with her own leggings while they had sex and that he had killed 48 more people.

The arrest of el Arropiero made it possible to clarify some crimes that had remained unresolved to date, including others (Hernández Carrasco) that had happened due to accidents. Manuel Delgado Villegas did not have a defense attorney until six and a half years after his arrest, having the record of preventive arrest without legal protection. He was never tried, since he was diagnosed with a mental illness and in 1978 the National Court ordered his placement in a specialized center.

When he was traveling with some agents to verify his crimes, he heard on the radio that a Mexican had killed more people than he had. El Arropiero replied verbatim: "Give me 24 hours and I assure you that a miserable Mexican is not going to be a better murderer than a Spaniard."

Medical tests carried out on him revealed that he had the XYY sexual trisomy (rather than the common male endowment, XY), which, at the time, was said to be characterized by mental retardation that In some cases, it induces to be more aggressive. Current medical studies refute this theory. El Arropiero was released in 1998, dying shortly after from a lung disease caused by excessive tobacco use.

El Arropiero in the cinema

At the beginning of 2009, the Catalan director Carles Balagué premiered the documentary Arropiero, el vagabundo de la muerte, about the life and murders of Manuel Delgado.

Latest contributions

Perhaps it can help to better understand the real person that Manuel Delgado Villegas was, closer to the legend of El Arropiero, the chapter dedicated to him in the book "Criminals, Victims and Executioners: Black Chronicle of Spain (1939–1975)", Ed. Peninsula, Catalan-Deus, José (2011).