Murder of Rocío Wanninkhof

Amidst popular pressure and a media circus characterized at times as a "public lynching" of the accused,[1][2] a jury trial convicted 52-year-old María Dolores "Loli" Vázquez, the ex-girlfriend of Wanninkhof's mother Alicia Hornos, for the murder, even though there was no evidence relating her to the crime.[3] Others have also cited malinterpretations of Vázquez's behaviour due to her Galician extraction and traditional British comportment, being dissonant with local social norms, attitudes and expectations.[5][6] All charges against Vázquez were dropped when both DNA were matched to Tony Alexander King, a 32-year-old British sex offender with a long criminal history in the United Kingdom.Hornos continued to reside in Mijas with her children, and later began a new relationship with a Spanish man, Juan Cerrillo, that was ongoing at the time of Rocío's murder and Vázquez's trial.In 1986, when he was 19, he was sentenced to ten years in a detention centre for young delinquents for the non-fatal strangulation and sexual assault of five women in the London district of Holloway.Shortly after his release he changed his name, which is allowed to people convicted in cases of great public notoriety in the United Kingdom.An order of arrest was issued the next day, but King and Pantoja had already fled to Málaga and found refuge in its large British expatriate community.Six months later, British police located King in Mijas, where he was working as a real estate agent, and requested him to return voluntarily to the UK.When he refused, they informed Spain's Ministry of the Interior of King's presence in Málaga, but this notice was labelled "low risk" and was not accompanied by a petition of arrest and extradition.Pantoja (who continued to use her surname, as per Spanish and Latin American custom) abandoned him in 2000, citing economic problems and her own fear that he was involved in Rocío Wanninkhof's murder.In 2001, King began to work in a local English pub called "Chicken Shack," where he became friends with a co-worker named Simon Bowers.According to her boyfriend, she left then with the intention of taking a shower and changing clothes in her home, before reuniting with him and other friends at a fair in Fuengirola later that night.During this walk, the couple found a pair of running shoes that they identified as Wanninkhof's, a napkin, and several blood stains in a vacant lot next to the road used by her."Three or four days" after the disappearance, a taxi driver came forward to say that the night of the crime, at 22:00, he dodged an off-road vehicle driving on the wrong lane at the exact point on the road where the running shoes were found.[14] Wanninkhof's nude body was found on 2 November near the sporting club "Los Altos del Rodeo," between Marbella and San Pedro de Alcántara.[16] Most factual evidence exculpated her but the prosecutor relied heavily in attacking the character of Dolores and her lesbian relationship with Rocío's mother Alicia.[5] Her disappearance quickly became subject of media interest, the search to find Carabantes was extensive with more than 700 volunteers, with helicopter and a caving team.[26] In 2021, Netflix released the feature-length documentary film Murder by the Coast (El Caso Wanninkhof-Carabantes in Spanish) narrating the events, timeline and aftermath of the case.