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During the 17 months that Dolores Vázquez (today 67 years) was unjustly in jail, Pedro Apalategui ( Madrid , 1947), his lawyer, never missed a Saturday in the prison of Alahurín de la Torre ( Málaga ). His visits, recalls the prestigious lawyer from Malaga, were "the only link that tied Dolores to sanity."
When you are reminded of the Wanninkhof case , Apalategui has a phrase engraved that, however hard you try, you can never forget it. Vázquez asked him a question after several months of sterile interrogations of the Civil Guard and many hours of television in which, with the gloomy breath of the most scavenging journalism, Alicia Hornos , her former partner and Rocío Wanninkhof's mother, came to accuse her of having killed his daughter. Of course, there were also hundreds of press publications. A sample of an article entitled "The worst revenge": "If his disappointment, his resentment, his aversion, went to the extremes he has shown, until machining take a person's life, why didn't he choose who made him experience so dark feelings instead of sentencing one of his daughters? " Up to that point it reached the environmental pressure. Therefore, it should not surprise us that Dolores, innocent, asked her lawyer. "Pedro, and isn't it possible that I killed Rocío without realizing it and he doesn't remember me?"
Apalategui's heart was shrinking when he heard these words. But he understood what Loli could feel, his client and also his cause. Just a few minutes before, when the public address of the jail had called Dolores Vázquez for the visit, the rest of the dams had replied with an already usual choir. "Murder, killer, killer."
Doubt the cellmate
The anguish was such that he distrusted the cellmate who had been assigned to free her from the temptation of suicide. Dolores thought she had the task of spying on her while she slept in case she confessed in dreams. [Of that he did not remember what he had done]. This was told by Dolores herself in 2013 during a conference at the Observatory of the presumption of innocence and parallel trials, convened by the Fernando Pombo Foundation , the Wolters Kluwer Foundation and the Carlos III University .
Those who attended such an exceptional conference were amazed by the sweetness and tranquility with which Vázquez spoke, a character very different from what the media had described during the almost four years that his judicial and media ordeal lasted. "Cold, calculating and aggressive" are three of the adjectives that most repeated in the chronicles of events of the time and in the television programs dedicated to the case in which of course there was no lack of Alicia Hornos, mother the victim, in (and is excusable) shock at the loss of his daughter.
In reality, the three adjectives came from a dubious study conducted by a Civil Guard psychologist who testified at the trial. "He has explosions of hate, uncontrolled genius and life reactions typical of abusers."
The hardest part of Dolores Vázquez's words - "and it is not possible that he killed her ...?" - is that the environmental pressure - brutal and merciless - made her even doubt herself. But Dolores had nothing to do with what Tony King (actually Tony Bromwich , christened in the United Kingdom as the choke of Holloway and with a long history as a sexual predator) did on October 9, 1999 when he met Rocío Wanninkhof, 19 years old The young woman traveled the 500 meters that separated the house in which her boyfriend lived from her own home in Mijas . A brief account of what the murderer would confess four years later, when he was arrested for ending the life of another young woman, Sonia Carabantes : Rocío entered a busy street and Tony King put a razor in his neck. She tried to get rid of her macabre hug and the razor tore her neck. King immediately understood that he had gone too far and began to stab Rocío. He did it nine times. The autopsy revealed that only one of them had been facing.
frightful scream
A passing taxi driver told the police that about 10 pm that day he had heard a frightful scream that gave him the "spiky hair." And what he did? "I got scared and quickly closed the taxi windows."
Presumably, the assassination caused King to suddenly recover from his drunkenness. First he covered the body with some branches but after wandering around a few minutes he returned to the scene of the crime: he took the knife and the bloody clothes and drove to the coast to throw the evidence into the sea. He also took the body. Two weeks later, he decided to burn it in El Rodeíto, a place past Marbella . At the scene of the crime, only a handkerchief, Rocío's slippers and a pool of blood remained. Although a search device was organized, everyone sensed the fatal outcome of the one already baptized as a young man from Mijas , which would be confirmed on November 2 when his semi-coordinated body appeared in El Rodeíto .
Events usually follow a pattern. Society needs guilty. The boyfriend, a foreigner for whom Rocío occasionally worked as a babysitter, was discarded, an exhibitionist who lived a few kilometers ... "Whoever we are going to kill him with stones," a neighbor told this newspaper. "You have to hang him from the tree," said Amadeo Hornos , the girl's uncle. In August 2000, the media published the first information that a person close to the victim was being investigated. The name of Dolores Vázquez was soon released to public light. Some even recorded his arrest live.
Loli Vázquez was the ideal killer for the mentality of the time. A strong, independent woman, a professional with a career and especially a lesbian (she had lived 12 years with Alicia Hornos). Unfortunately, homosexuality was not so normalized. It can be said that she was the perverse lesbian, a term coined by Beatriz Gimeno in her analysis of the media treatment of the case. Radios, newspapers and televisions told many contradictory things. That Dolores Vázquez considered Rocío to be the culprit in her breakup and that she hated her for it; that it was Dolores who had decided to leave Alicia, that Dolores punished and mistreated Rocío.
Alicia Hornos became a regular presence on TV sets. Dolores Vázquez, by shame, had forbidden Apalategui to use something that would have settled the debate about her relationship with the girl. A notebook that Rocío had given him. "You are such a beautiful girl, so nice, so kind, so beautiful, and so chubby. That I have given you this little book. That way I love you as much as this heart and if I didn't love you it would break like this. For Loli de Rocío", and the drawing of three red hearts, one of which is broken.
"An encerrona"
Dolores Vázquez granted a single interview. By then the trial was already being prepared. How do you think it will work out? They asked. "They have prepared a lock up for me. Win or lose, what is happening to me will mark me for life, since they have shown me as Rocío's killer in the whole country," he said. Actually, the Civil Guard investigation had failed any evidence against Vázquez. The fibers found in the body did not match Vázquez's clothes. The murder weapon had not appeared. The car was not found, nor blood on the defendant's clothes.
The truth is that because of the absence of evidence it seemed impossible that Dolores Álvarez was convicted of the murdered girl of Mijas. And that was what Apalategui commented to his client on the eve of the sentence. But the popular court had already condemned it. On September 25, 2001, the judge sentenced María Dolores Vázquez to 15 years and one day in prison and compensation of 18 million pesetas.
The conviction was so scandalous that in February 2002, five months later, the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia ordered the trial to be repeated. Dolores Vázquez, who had been imprisoned for 17 months listening to the "murderer, murderer, murderer", was able to return home and hug her mother.
The case took an unexpected turn while Dolores prepared the new trial with Apalategui. On September 18, 2003, Sonia Carabantes was killed and the National Police arrested Tony King. An analysis reveals that his prints were also on a cigarette butt next to the body of Rocío Wanninkhof. As Apalategui recalls: "The response of the Civil Guard was not to apologize to Dolores Vázquez. To cover the shame, he again used the media, insisting on introducing Dolores Vázquez on the scene. The media again used the leaks of the Guard without checking if the news was true or not. " It was even published that Tony King was an employee of Dolores Vázquez.
Apalategui's fame
Whenever there is a media murder in Spain , the lawyers of the accused tend to call Pedro Apalategui. The lawyer differentiates parallel judgments from aggressive parallel judgments that take such denomination when there is an intention to violate any of the legal assets that the process protects through the Constitution .
Years later he still insists on highlighting the social pressures that the Civil Guard received for not having achieved results shortly after the body was found. As Apalategui pointed out in a round table on the presumption of innocence: "I am sure that the reason for the arrest of Dolores Vázquez, the circumstances in which it occurred, is a consequence of the intervention of the Ministry. The alleged detention occurs from of pure conjecture and personal value judgments of the police forces that decide to blame Dolores Vázquez.The initial reaction of the media, curiously at the domicile of the accused person, anonymous until that time, is disproportionate. The coverage itself is already suspicious that three media filmed the arrest live. From then on that is the image of Dolores Vázquez that is repeated over and over again. Television programs were broadcast on national networks where authentic polls were made about Dolores Vázquez's guilt or innocence , which evidently influenced the judge who was forced to make an instruction devoid of evidence and influenced for media pressure. "
Nothing we do not see in the informative treatment of the many cases of corruption - it was not a crime that changed Spain better - and especially murder. Don't they remember the television show at the time Diana Quer was missing?
Dolores Vázquez tries to live - despite the fact that something died in those 17 months - in Galicia . He doesn't want anyone to hear from her again. In his day he claimed four million euros for the 519 days he was in prison. Recently, the Constitutional was positioned to indemnify all "provisional prisons that do not end in a conviction." In his only appearance, Dolores ended with a lapidary phrase. "Nobody has asked me for forgiveness."
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