For years, José Antonio Rodríguez Vega led a double life in Santander, Spain. To his neighbors, he may have seemed like a kind, hardworking man, but between 1987 and 1988 he became one of the best-known serial killers in the history of Spanish crime. He raped and murdered 16 women between the ages of 61 and 93.
The most disturbing part came after his arrest. From prison, Rodríguez Vega claimed that those crimes were motivated by something to do with his own mother. “It has been a revenge against my mother”, he wrote in a letter. According to his explanation, he felt a mixture of love and hatred toward her and, unable to kill her, ended up taking out that resentment on other women.
His modus operandi was also disturbing. Because he worked in construction, he watched elderly women who lived alone, studied their routines, and then showed up at their homes with various excuses: he might pose as a technician, an inspector, or a worker offering to make a repair.
He didn’t always attack during the first visit. According to the investigations, he sought to gain his victims’ trust before assaulting them. He then suffocated them, and in some cases the deaths were initially considered natural because of the women’s age.
At his home, the police also found items he had stolen from his victims, including jewelry and other keepsakes he kept as trophies. He was eventually sentenced to 440 years in prison for the 16 murders and the rapes.
But the story took one last turn. In 2002, while serving his sentence at Topas prison, he was murdered by two other inmates, who stabbed him 113 times. One of them summed up his justification in a sentence when testifying before the judge: “I did society a favor”.
The man who claimed that it had all begun with hatred toward his own mother ended up dying in prison, after becoming responsible for 16 murders.