The case of a woman wrongly convicted of murdering her ex-lover’s teenage daughter on the Costa Del Sol is re-examined in a new Netflix documentary.
Murder on the Coast, which will be released on June 23, recounts how a media circus and widespread homophobia led to the arrest, trial, and eventual conviction of Maria Dolores Vázquez after Dutch-Spanish teen Rocio Wanninkhof, 19, was stabbed to death in 1999.
Vázquez, now 69, was Rocio’s mother’s estranged lover at the time of the crime, and was arrested and convicted of murder with no evidence. She was portrayed as a ‘predatory lesbian’ by the Spanish media, which is thought to have influenced the jury.
In 2003, while investigating the murder of 17-year-old Sonia Carabantes, police found that DNA at the crime scene matched DNA found on Rocio’s body, which belonged to British sex offender Tony Alexander King.
In 2005, King was convicted of murder in Sonia’s case and sentenced to 36 years in prison with an additional seven years for an unrelated sexual attack. The following year he was sentenced to a further 19 years for Rocio’s murder and all charges against Vázquez were dropped.
By the time she was released, Dolores had spent 17 months in prison, in what is now seen as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in the judiciary history of Spain since 1910.
The upcoming Netflix true crime documentary Murder by the Coast looks into the murder case of Rocio Wanninkhof, who was murdered in Mijas, near Malaga in 1999. Her mother’s ex-lover Dolores Vázquez was wrongfully accused of the crime and15 years in jail. Pictured: Dolores’ arrest
Rocio had bene walking home from her boyfriend’s house and intended to go out later that night when she was approached by British expat Tony King, who put a razor to her neck and stabbed her nine times in Mijas
Rocio’s mother, Alicia Hornos, began her relationship with Dolores Vázquez when she was still married to her daughter’s father Willem ‘Guillermo’ Wanninkhof.
She left him a year after beginning the affair. Wanninkhof moved back to his native Netherlands, and Alicia moved in with Dolores before buying a house together.
After their parents’ divorce in 1983, Rocio and her sister Rosa looked to Dolores as a mother and signed their names Vázquez Hornos.
Dolores and Alicia separated in 1988, 11 years before the murder, but remained friends before falling out in 1994. Alicia started a new relationship, this time with a man, Juan Cerrillo, and was still with him when Rocio was murdered.
In 2003, the lifeless body of 17-year-old Sonia Carabantes, pictured, was found in Coin, near Malaga. The traces of DNA found under her nails matched a cigarette stub found near Rocio’s body
Tony King, pictured on the first day of his trial for Sonia’s murder in 2005, was sentenced to 36 years in jail for killing Sonia, and to an additional seven years for another sexual assault. In 2006, he was sentenced to a further 19 years for Rocio’s murder
Soon into the murder investigation, police, under pressure to find a suspect, pointed the finger at Dolores Vázquez.
Euroweekly reported in 2019 that Vázquez was suspected because an eye-witness had placed a red Toyota Celica driven by two men in the area near where Rocio had been seen for the last time, and Vasquez owned the same model.
Almost a year after the murder, Vázquez was arrested on October 7, 2000. Dozens of TV cameras had been waiting at her property.
Pictured: Dolores during a press conference before her trial in 2001. She was convicted by a jury
A search poster for Rocio before her body was found three weeks later. The teen was taken on her way home on October 9 1999
Pictured: Dolores hearing the verdict at her trial in the case of Rocio’s murder. She spent 17 months in jail before charges against her were dropped in 2003
‘From the time Dolores Vazquez was arrested she became the focus of the media,’ Professor Francesc Barata, who teaches journalism at the Ramon Llull University wrote in an essay on the case.‘Her private life was divulged, her cold personality was interpreted as calculating and unscrupulous, and her relationship with the victim’s mother became the “un-confessable” motive of her crime.’
Personal information about Dolores was leaked to the press, and as the public interest in Rocio’s killing grew, the national and local newspapers and TV stations competed with one another to get the best exclusive, divulging as much about Dolores’s sexuality as possible.
Rocio’s mother appeared on TV, pointing the figure at Dolores for her daughter’s murder.
Alicia Hornos, Rocio’s mother cried after hearing the verdict of King’s trial in the case of Rocio in Malaga on December 13 2006
It was said that Dolores had never taken to Rocio and blamed her for the fallout with her mother Alicia, and had plotted her revenge against her.
Homosexually was not normalised in Spain at the time of Rocio’s murder, and Dolores sexual preference was used to paint her as a dominant and violent person.
In September 2003, Luis Gomez, a journalist for El Pais, Spain’s national newspaper, revealed that after Dolores’ arrest, the victim’s family ‘went from one television programme to another, dragging up old stories that confirmed her cold, unfriendly, demanding and violent character’.
It was the DNA on a cigarette stub, pictured, found near Rocio’s body that linked her case to the murder of Sonia Carabantes
Sonia’s body was found in August 2003, and Tony King’s girlfriend went to police in September, saying she had seen him come home with a blood stained T-shirt around the time Sonia went missing
It is believed that the blanket negative coverage of Dolores, and the fact she was seen as already guilty in the public opinion, influenced the jury at her trial.
It was reported by her lawyer in 2014 that there were almost no deliberations before her conviction, in spite of a total lack of evidence that she had killed Rocio.
In 2014, Vázquez said she remembered how the other prisoners at Alhaurín de la Torre jail in Málagawould shouted ‘murderer’ whenever she had a visit.
Speaking to El Pais, Her lawyer Pedro Apalategui said he gave up all his Saturdays to visit her for 17 months.
‘I soon realised that my visits were the only thing keeping Dolores sane,’ he said.
Vázquez was so anxious that she began to believe her cellmate, who had been assigned to stop her from committing suicide, was actually spying on her in case she confessed in her sleep.
The public pressure and accusation was so strong that Vázquez asked Apalategui if she had ‘killed Rocio without realising’ and didn’t remember, Tellerreport wrote in 2019.
Pictured: King being led to prison after testifying in Torremolinos in January 2005. King had a history of sexual attacks in the UK and he fled to Spain after he attempted to rape a woman in Surrey
Vázquez, whose parents moved to Spain from Epsom, moved back to the UK after she was released from prison.
She worked for a transport company in East London in 2014, underwent a psychological evaluation following her ordeal, which ruled she was only 35 per cent of her former self.
In 2014, she said she was still awaiting an apology, after years of anxiety where she would struggle to talk to people and find a job, and would memorise the licence plates of the cars following her.
Rocio went missing on October 9, 1999 after leaving her boyfriend’s home at 9:30pm.
Her boyfriend told police she had left with the intention of going home to take a shower before meeting him and friends at a fair.
The last time Rocio was seen alive was walking to Mijas, where she lived wirh her mother.
The next day, her mother was alarmed when Rocio wasn’t home, and contacted her friends to find if they had seen her. She didn’t report her daughter’s disappearance right away, and instead when for a walk with Cerrillo to calm herself down.
King in 2005 at his trial. The sex offender went to prison in 1986 for several sexual assaults in Holloway, and again in 1995 for trying to rob a woman. Scotland Yard alerted the Spanish Ministry of Interior that he was located in Malaga, but he was labelled as ‘low risk’
On their walk, the couple came across shoes they recognised as Rocio’s, napkins and several bloodstains close to the road.
They alerted the Civil Guard, who secured the area and began a search with the help of the family and thousands of neighbours.
During their search, police found a trail of blood which led from the road to a larger pool. They also found bloody marks indicating a body had been dragged, and tire marks, suggesting someone had loaded a body in a small car and driven off.
A few days after Rocio’s disappearance, a cab driver testified he had seen a vehicle driving on the wrong side of the road, and on the side of the road where the teen’s shoes had been found.
He added that he heard a ‘high-pitched scream’ when he passed the vehicle. Seven days after Rocio’s disappearance, it was confirmed that the blood at the scene was hers.
Nearly a month later, on November 2, Rocio’s body was found between Marbella and San Pedro de Alcántara, near the sporting club Los Altos del Rodeo.
Alicia Hornos pictured crying with her sister Josefa, left, after King was found guilty of murdering her daugther in 2006. Before her former lover’s trial in 2001, Hornos gave several interviews where she blamed Dolores for Rocio’s killing
The teen had been disfigured and stabbed nine times. Her sister Rosa identified that rings, two T-shirts and other objects found in rubbish bags near the body belonged to Rocio.
The body was covered by leaves and bushes when it was found, and several causes for its late stage of decomposition such a short time after the murder were suggested, including carbonisation and flesh-eating wasps.
It was ruled the wounds were caused by a thin single-edge razor, and it was noted the first wound was the most damaging, ensuring Rocio experienced a quick death. It was believed the eight additional stab wounds were inflicted to make sure she was dead.
Due to the advanced stage of decomposition of the body, it was impossible to know whether she had been sexually assaulted or not.
King being led to prison by police after testifying in Fuengirola on August 2004. The sex offender admitted to killing both Sonia Carabantes and Rocio Wanninkhof
In 2001, Dolores was convicted by a people’s jury for the murder of Rocio, but a Court overturned her conviction three months later, and she was due to stand another trial.
In 2003, another murder case would shed new light on Rocio’s killing, and would lead to the right suspect.
The body of Carabantes was found in the nearby village of Coin.
On September 18, the girlfriend of a British man who had relocated to Spain, Tony Alexander King, also known as Tony Bromwich, contacted the police.
She said she was suspicious after finding some blood stains on his T-shirt days after Sonia’s body was discovered. Through DNA evidence, police were able to link King to Sonia’s murder.
King’s DNA matched a cigarette stub that had been found in 1999 near Rocio’s body.
Dolores was released and charges against her were all dropped after this discovery.
King had moved his family to Spain and lived there under a fake name because he was wanted in the UK for the assault and attempted rape of a woman at Leatherhead railway station in Surrey.
In 1986, he was jailed after a series of sexual assaults in Holloway, London, where he was called ‘the Holloway Strangler’.
He was released in 1991, but was sent back to prison in 1992 after robbing a woman at knifepoint.
British police located King in Malaga and requested him to come back to the UK, but he refused.
British forces contacted the Spanish Ministry of Interior and informed of King’s presence in Malaga, but he was labelled low risk, and no petition for arrest or extradition was ever filed.
After he was arrested for Carabantes’ murder, King confessed he followed Rocio as she entered a busy street on her way home from her boyfriend’s and put a razor to her neck.
When she tried to free herself from her assailant, the razor cut into Rocio’s neck, and King panicked and stabbed her nine times.
In 2005, King was sentenced to 36 years in prison for Sonia’s murder, with an additional sentence of seven years for the sexual assault of another women.
In 2006, he was sentenced to a further 19 years in prison for the murder of Rocío.
Murder by the Coast airs from June 23 on Netflix UK.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
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