A serial rapist has been sentenced to 59 years in prison for sexually assaulting six women whom he lured to the Madrid town of Valdemoro with false job offers. The Provincial Court of Madrid has found him guilty of six rapes of vulnerable women who responded to his advertisements, but the judges suspect that there may be dozens of victims of this sexual predator: the investigators found 9,000 photos and scanned documentation of more women in identical circumstances to the six women who finally decided to denounce him. The sentence, which has already been appealed by the convicted, establishes a maximum effective term of 20 years in prison.
All the victims reported a similar situation. They saw an advertisement on the internet with job offers to clean, to be a masseuse or directly to prostitute themselves. They went by bus to Valdemoro and there they were received by the same man, who, with the excuse of having the premises under construction, took the women to his house. They all met the same pattern: women in need, often alone in Spain and with several dependent children, with a great need to earn some money. One of them, for example, had her husband in prison. Another had three small children to care for alone.
What the victims did not know was that behind the false job advertisement, the false office under construction and the false identity was hiding a sex offender who had already been convicted of sexual abuse in the past and who at that very moment was benefiting from the judicial suspension of his last step on the bench. Once in his house, the sexual aggressor would threaten the victims, force them to submit to sexual photo sessions and then, sometimes under beatings, they would be raped.
The threats that the Justice declares proven had a very specific origin and objective: to let the women know that he had raped that, if they spoke, there would be consequences. One of them had to move and change her children’s school. Another, after confessing that she was in an irregular situation in our country, she heard her rapist say that “if I kill you, I’ll throw you in a bag and no one will know about you.” She accompanied one of them by bus to her house to try to find out where she lived. “Be very careful with your tongue,” she warned another of the women to avoid making a complaint.
The strategy of intimidating his victims after raping them worked until one of them had to go to the hospital and, from there, an investigation by the Civil Guard began that culminated in his arrest and preventive detention in January 2020. Three years after the first detected violation. The first woman to go to court led the investigators through Valdemoro until they identified the areas of the city in the south of Madrid where she had been with the rapist. The Civil Guard made her arrest public and then came the complaints of five more victims. But the sentence relates that it was not easy. One, for example, vomited in a panic attack inside the barracks itself before signing the complaint.
The result is a sentence of 59 years in prison signed by the Provincial Court of Madrid for six crimes of sexual assault, although the judges establish a maximum effective term of 20 years behind bars. The sentence, which has already been appealed by the rapist before the Superior Court of Justice, also includes compensation and restraining orders for the complainants and expresses his fear that, in reality, there are many more women who have been victims of this rapist in series: “There are relevant indications of a very stable performance over time and in relation to many other people, as verified in the digital analysis carried out, both with respect to the computer and the mobile phone of the accused,” the judges warn. They have already contested the condemned appeal, according to sources in the case.
The investigators located “more than 9,000 photographs of women in the same or very similar positions as the complainants here, as well as photographs of personal documents,” explains the Madrid Court. When the Civil Guard released his arrest and preventive detention, three years after the first attack, the first reports spoke of four crimes of sexual assault and he has finally been convicted of raping six women with the same strategy.
Justice gives full credibility to the story of these six women in the face of the various exculpatory versions of the rapist, who went from saying in the investigation phase that they were prostitutes whom he had paid to affirm in the trial that he had had consensual relations with them. Faced with this, the Madrid Court highlights the “commendable” investigation and “safety” in the statement of a group of women who did not know each other and that the only thing they had in common was having fallen into the clutches of this predator sexual. That and his situation of vulnerability that he, according to the judges, took advantage of.
A “clear coincidence in modus operandi” describes the sentence. The defendant “used the deception of offering non-existent jobs knowing and taking advantage of the encouragement that it meant for people who came to the website in a situation of need” and deployed a “secrecy strategy” using a false name and inventing that the headquarters of his company was under construction.
Some of the women ended up submitting to his abuse and aggression because of the fear that his threats had produced and because of the high degree of intimidation he achieved by taking them to a secluded place, taking pictures of them and implying that, if he did anything to them, no one I would ask about them. “The submission achieved through intimidating means cannot be presented as free acceptance of sexual acts in a scenario of domination that impeded the victims’ ability to react,” the judges say. They could not report because he, they explain, kept all his personal data.