The search for a serial killer after the discovery of a woman's body inside a suitcase in Vigo

A week after the completely accidental discovery of the corpse of a woman abandoned inside a suitcase in a neighborhood of Vigo, agents from the Police Station managed to solve a crime that had been perpetrated six months earlier and clear up the great unknowns of the case. Investigations against the clock led to the identity of the victim, Carmen Bento, 60, and the alleged perpetrator of her stabbing, José Manuel Durán González, 66, who was arrested when he tried to flee. Now, with the evidence and clues accumulated, investigators face a man who spent 36 years in prison for two previous murders and who has supposedly killed again after serving his last sentence. “We can call him a serial killer or multiple murderer, it doesn't matter, because everything indicates that we are dealing with the personality of a psychopath who has killed three people, as far as we know, every time he has been released from prison, and that is the answer extreme of violent behavior,” says one of those responsible for the investigation.

In the Pontevedra town of A Lama, where Durán was born, he is known by the nickname El Chioleiro. This small municipality of barely 3,000 inhabitants was the scene of the two crimes that appear in his prison record, for which he is prohibited from returning there. In 1988, he attacked his elderly 83-year-old grandmother, whom he raped and then stabbed to death. Now, on March 1, when he had been free for a year after serving his last sentence of 17 and a half years in prison for killing a friend of the town in 2004 to rob her, Durán would have acted again in Vigo, killing another woman. , using a knife, the same weapon of his crimes.

On February 22, a delivery driver stopped to urinate in the ditch of an abandoned property on Espedrigada Street, one kilometer from the Balaídos stadium, in Vigo, when he saw what looked like a suitcase wrapped in plastic in the undergrowth. Inside, the body of a half-naked woman was found without any clue as to her identity. The Homicide Brigade then began an intense search to identify her body, tracking the list of reports of disappearances, so at first it was thought that she could be of Portuguese nationality.

The autopsy was able to determine that the victim, middle-aged and short, had several stab incisions, but one of them was fatal in the heart. After analyzing the database, the agents managed to get on the right track. They located some complaints registered last summer from the neighborhood of number 83 Fragoso Street, just 100 meters from the place where the suitcase appeared. They referred to a couple's strong arguments and bad smells in the room they rented. After intensive investigations, they found that a woman whose description matched the victim had stayed there, but as a result of the complaints they stopped seeing her in the neighborhood.

The investigation then focused on the search for a woman of Spanish nationality, at risk of social exclusion and who would have been staying in that home, in the vicinity of the neighborhood where the suitcase was found. In a week of great media coverage, the Police were able to put together all the pieces of the puzzle: identify the victim and the alleged perpetrator. “We had no camera recordings, no fingerprints, and no location of mobile phones, but given the profile of the man we were looking for and his violent history, we had less doubts than certainties,” sources in the investigation say.

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The Police confirmed that the victim was Carmen Bento Domínguez, 60 years old, a resident of the town of Celanova (Ourense) who led a completely uprooted life. Her family had lost track of her years ago, when she stopped visiting her sister. She had been married there, but she left the village after separating from her partner and being a victim of continuous abuse. It is believed that he lived with his murderer for approximately a month, when he had just left the penitentiary center where he fully served his last sentence and without incidents as a troublesome inmate, although with a psychiatric file that left little doubt for investigators about the risk of recidivism.

The evidence of the third murder

On March 1, eight days after the body in the suitcase appeared, Judge Juan Carlos Carballal, who is directing the investigation, ordered the arrest of Juan Carlos Durán. The agents had as a reference to identify him some photos from his police file, but his physique was very different, he was practically unrecognizable. He was already preparing to leave Vigo because he knew that the agents had been investigating his whereabouts and were tracking him. The Police located him at the city bus station, before buying the ticket, so it is not known where he was going.

The detainee appeared calm and cooperative. He answered all the questions that both the judge and the prosecutor asked him during almost an hour of interrogation. Assisted by a court-appointed lawyer, Durán admitted that he knew the victim, but categorically denied the facts and defended himself by diverting attention to other people who seemed suspicious to him, men with whom he said he had seen Carmen.

But the evidence accumulated against Durán. He had been living with the victim, his background was irrefutable and inside his backpack he hid documentary evidence that is definitive to unravel the case. Some handwritten papers that directly incriminate him and that investigators interpret as a fairly common event or behavior, which describes elements of the personality of a serial killer.

With this evidence, the judge sent him for the third time to the prison in A Lama, his hometown. He attributes the alleged responsibility for the murder of Carmen Bento to her, waiting for all the scientific evidence on DNA and fingerprints of the victim and the suitcase where she was abandoned to reach the court. It is believed that once the crime was committed in the rented room, Durán kept the suitcase for a while until the neighbors protested about the bad odors in the house, according to a comparison of the complaints made by the Police. He then abandoned the suitcase a few meters from the building. A witness who lives in the adjacent property assured that the suitcase had been there since August.

For the moment, the judge has not accused Durán of any gender-aggravating circumstance, while it is being investigated whether the trigger for the crime could have been a strong argument between the two over money. The accused had a prison benefit that inmates receive when they leave prison for their social reintegration, while the victim lived by begging.

The impulse of a murderer

Chioleiro has spent more than half his life in prison, from which he was released in February of last year. The Pontevedra Court sentenced him to 17 years in prison for the murder of his neighbor Alicia Rey, 33, committed on December 11, 2004. Durán was free, but the entire town knew how he had ended his life. from his grandmother 16 years earlier, for which he had been held in a psychiatric center until he returned to A Lama prison in 2003 and left there the following year. Durán saw her victim heading to the supermarket, but he convinced her to accompany him to Monte de Santa Ana, where he stabbed her and stole her jewelry, money and bank cards, according to the sentence. Two days later, some neighbors found the girl's half-buried body and the Civil Guard arrested Durán, who confessed to the crime.

The defense strategy focused on trying to convince the jury that the accused suffered from psychopathy that prevented him from controlling his will and that he had the mental age of a teenager. But the popular court did not see any psychic alteration and did not believe Durán when he said that he killed her because she had asked him to.

He reported that the first stab in the neck was accidental and that in the second it was Alicia herself who placed the knife on her chest and stabbed herself. He was unanimously found guilty of murder, committed premeditated and knowing what he was doing. A permanent prison sentence, the maximum penalty approved in 2015, could have prevented Durán's crimes. He now he faces her.