• Events Solved the 'crime of etiquette': a gang killed a man in Vallecas to steal the safe on behalf of his cousins
  • Events Found the body of a man wrapped in a cloth in a field in the Madrid district of Villa de Vallecas

María José is 46 years old and has been sleeping in prison for more than one year for her criminal greed. She is accused of killing two wealthy men in four months for economic reasons. In August 2021, he suffocated to death a merchant marine in Torrejón and then burned his body in Vallecas. In November, he entered the Vallecas home of Freddy, owner of a real estate agency, with two thugs to take the money he had in the safe. They ended up killing him, but he gave them away a label they left on some bridles.

The alleged murderer worked as a prostitute for years in several clubs on the outskirts and ended up opening an aesthetic center on Enmedio Street in Torrejón. The investigator of Group VI of Homicides, which has solved the case, defined the detainee as a survivor of the worlds of drugs and prostitution, in which the murdered, Gabriel E. S., a 63-year-old sailor who had a double life: that of his "impeccable" work at sea and that of his "serious addiction" to narcotics and other excesses.

He worked for a hydrocarbon company and spent half the year on board and receiving about 7,000 euros a month, money that he entrusted to people in the environment of prostitution, since due to a debt with Social Security he did not have any bank account in his name in Spain. According to the investigator, in recent times he had placed his trust in the main suspect, María José, a former prostitute with a background with whom he maintained an "interested" relationship. She, like other people in the past, had deceived him on numerous occasions and had stolen part of the money from his payrolls, although the victim, away from his family environment, continued to trust. Until August 2021, the researcher says, the woman went to pick him up at Barajas airport after spending her last season on board. They moved to Torrejón, where the now arrested lived and ran the beauty business. Inside that establishment she ended his life, suffocating him according to the conclusions of the autopsy. It has not been proven whether he planned the crime, but they have concluded that the motivation was economic.

The body of the victim was found days later in a pine forest near the street of Cerro del Murmullo – an area with habitual transfer of drug addicts and cruising practitioners (practice of looking for a sexual partner walking or driving through a public place) – after a neighbor warned of a fire in the place. In addition to partially burned, the man – it has not been possible to determine if alive or "post mortem" – had amputated the distal phalanges of the fingers and had extracted the teeth, a criminal practice that aims to make it difficult to identify the victim. "We had it very difficult," stresses the researcher, but the Scientific Police, with a "deeply thorough" work, managed to identify the deceased.

After several investigations, suspicions focused on the now arrested, who days after the crime asked an acquaintance for his car, with the excuse of a move, to move the body of the merchant marine to the pine forest where he tried to burn it. The agents continued to investigate the possible involvement of third parties in the events, an extreme that has not been clarified to date.

When all suspicions pointed to María José as the author of the homicide, the woman was arrested along with eight other people for their involvement in the so-called crime of the label, that of the death of a Colombian man, Freddy, 51, whose relatives planned an assault on his home on Sierra Toledana Street in Vallecas at the end of 2021.

Freddy owned a real estate agency and wasbeaten to death by members of an organized gang who came to his house to steal money from the safe on behalf of a cousin and her husband, both Colombians. These two relatives had long had business with the victim and had outstanding accounts, according to investigators. In total, nine people were arrested, including the two relatives who were not at the victim's home at the time of the crime. The rest of the detainees are a Spanish citizen, four Dominicans and two Guineans. Among those arrested was Maria José, a former worker at Fredy's real estate agency.

This case was known as the crime of the label, since in the house were found some bridles with an orange label where only the name of Super Bazaar appeared, and the price of the marked product, 1.80 euros. The Homicide agents and the press office of the National Police disseminated the photograph on social networks and obtained in less than a day dozens of clues to determine that they had been bought in a store in Parla, which allowed obtaining key data for the investigation.


One of the nine arrested said in his statement that they went to the Selene de Torrejón beauty center to pick up a blonde woman in her 40s named María José. When they typed her name into the police database, they discovered that she had a 2009 record for fraud and that there was a complaint she had filed against the merchant seaman who was the victim of the homicide. Then they found out that María José had worked in the real estate of the murdered man in Vallecas. She was the one who knocked on the door of the house of the suspicious Freddy who, observing through the peephole, decided to let her in. Behind them were several young men who ended their lives after torture and threats. Days later, the Homicide agents went to her cell to formally accuse her of the merchant marine's crime.

  • Vallecas
  • Torrejón de Ardoz
  • Social security
  • Beaches

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