Murder of Rocío Wanninkhof

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.

Also in 2021, HBO Max released the six-part docuseries Dolores: The Truth About the Wanninkhof Case (Dolores: La verdad sobre el caso Wanninkhof in Spanish), which features Vázquez speaking publicly for the first time since her acquittal.

In 2008, a miniseries titled El Caso Wanninkhof was released by Televisión Española, with Valentina Burgueño starring as Rocío.

In 2007, King's daughter Sabrina drowned in a swimming pool, aged 10.

In 2005 Tony Alexander King was sentenced to 36 years in prison for the death of Sonia Carabantes and to an additional seven years for an unrelated sexual attack he had committed. In 2006 he was found guilty of the death of Rocío Wanninkhof and was sentenced to 19 years in prison for that crime.

Three months after Vázquez's conviction, the High Court of Andalusia overturned the sentence and ordered a new trial. However, all charges against Vázquez were dropped when DNA found near Wanninkhof's body was matched to Tony Alexander King, a 32-year-old British sex offender with a long criminal history in the United Kingdom, and who was also identified through DNA as the perpetrator of the murder of 17-year-old Sonia Carabantes in Coín in 2003. King was convicted of both murders and sentenced to 55 years in prison.

Following King's arrest in 2003, the British tabloid newspapers News of the World and The Sun claimed that British police were investigating King as a suspect in twelve unsolved murders of women in the UK that had taken place between 1987 and 1994. Scotland Yard dismissed this information as "pure speculation". However, it was later announced that King would be interrogated as a suspect in the 2002 murder of Milly Dowler.

While Vázquez was in prison awaiting her new trial, on 14 August 2003, there was a similar crime when 17-year-old Sonia Carabantes disappeared. In their investigation of this case the police discovered DNA which matched DNA found at the scene of the murder of Rocío. A woman soon told police that she suspected her ex-husband and when the police questioned him it was soon discovered that it was, indeed, his DNA. His name was Tony Alexander King and he was an English immigrant who, with his wife and daughter had come to live in southern Spain. It turned out he had a long criminal history and had served time in England for sexual crimes before changing his name and settling in Spain.

In 2003 it was estimated that the whole province was home to 180,000 permanent British residents and four or five times more transient ones, in addition to seven English-language newspapers, eight English-language radio stations and numerous real estate firms and pubs staffed and catered to British customers only.

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. However, she didn't report her suspicions to police and they were reported to have remained in contact and on good terms by other people. 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. Bowers later moved to Alhaurín el Grande and opened his own bar there, "The Bowers Arms," employing King as a cook, waiter and bouncer. While working there, King met a local school janitor, Mariluz Gallego, and he moved in with her and her three children. The home they lived in was inside the school and next to a Spanish Civil Guard station. However, King only interacted with the officers once in 2001, when he was questioned for poaching rabbits.

Rocío Wanninkhof said goodbye to her mother and sister around 17:30 of 9 October 1999. She walked the 500 meters between her home in the Mijas residential area "La Cortijera" and her boyfriend's home in La Cala de Mijas, where she stayed until 21:30. 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. This was the first and only time that Wanninkhof made the return trip alone and on foot; usually she would either be driven home by her boyfriend or picked up at his home by her mother or sister. A foreign resident that passed away before Vázquez's trial was the last person to see her alive, walking from La Cala to Mijas.

In August 1997, King threatened a Hungarian woman with a knife and attempted to rape her in Leatherhead railway station. The attack was recorded by a CCTV camera; after the film was broadcast on BBC One's Crimewatch on 2 September, Scotland Yard received numerous calls from viewers who identified the attacker as King. 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 labeled "low risk" and was not accompanied by a petition of arrest and extradition. Hornos worked in King's firm as a maid, but they never interacted.

However, King was rearrested six months later for robbing a woman at gunpoint. King was then recluded in regular prison until 1996. Shortly after his release he changed his name, which is allowed to people convicted in cases of great public notoriety in the United Kingdom. The same year, King married Chilean-born Cecilia Matilde Pantoja when she was two months pregnant with their daughter, Sabrina. He told Pantoja that he had a criminal record for armed robbery, but claimed that he had been forced into it because of poverty.

Wanninkhof's mother and sister contacted her boyfriend and friends the next day, all of whom denied having seen her at the fair. Though already alarmed, Hornos decided to go for a walk with Cerrillo to put herself at ease rather than reporting Wanninkhof's disappearance right away. 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. They alerted the Civil Guard, who cordoned off the area and started the search with the help of her family and over one thousand neighbors. Despite the absence of a body, it was immediately apparent to law enforcement that Wanninkhof had been murdered. A blood trail began at 1.10 meters from the sidewalk and continued to a blood pool large enough to have caused her death from exsanguination. Next to the pool were dragging marks, and crossing over them and the blood, there were tire tracks made by a small vehicle with a tire model that went out of production in 1993. Because the dragging marks continued over severely inclined terrain that would have made it difficult for one person to drag a body alone, it was believed that the body was dragged by at least two people, then left in a less exposed area of the vacant lot before the vehicle was brought in to transport the body to another location.

Though Hornos and Vázquez ended their relationship in 1988, they continued to live together for a while and generally remained on good terms until around 1994. The cause of their enmity may have been a dispute over the ownership of the house and other properties, according to Hornos's sister-in-law. 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.

After her divorce in 1983, Hornos kept legal custody of the children and she raised them with Vázquez as the couple's own. Rocío and her sister Rosa said that they had two mothers at their school, and signed several times with the surnames "Vázquez Hornos" in place of their legal name, Wanninkhof Hornos. Such was the case of Rocío's own personal diaries. Rosa also claimed that her own relation with Vázquez was one of "affection," even at the height of the media frenzy incriminating Vázquez.

Rocío Wanninkhof Hornos (9 November 1979 – 9 October 1999) was a Dutch-Spanish teenage girl who was murdered in her hometown of Mijas, Málaga, Spain, a town located on the Costa del Sol. In 2001, amidst popular pressure and a media circus (defined at times as a "public lynching" of the accused), a jury trial convicted 52-year-old María Dolores "Loli" Vázquez, the estranged lover of Wanninkhof's mother Alicia Hornos, for the murder, even though there was no evidence relating her to the crime. This miscarriage of justice has been blamed on prejudices about Vázquez's homosexuality and the fabrication of an unsubstantiated narrative about her being a "dominant", "predatory" lesbian. Others have also cited malinterpretations of Vázquez's behavior due to her Galician extraction and traditional British education being in dissonance with local social norms, attitudes and expectations.

Rocío Wanninkhof was born in 1979 to Willem "Guillermo" Wanninkhof, a Dutch citizen, and his Spanish wife Hilaria Alicia Hornos (known as Alicia), a native of Arroyo del Ojanco in rural Jaén province. Rocío had a sister and a brother. Hornos, who claims that Rocío's father was a domestic abuser, began her relationship with Vázquez in 1982, while she was still married. The following year, Hornos left her husband – who returned to the Netherlands – and moved into Vázquez's residence in Mijas, Màlaga province. The two purchased a house together, although Vázquez was named as the sole proprietor in the contract.

Tony Alexander King was born Anthony Bromwich in 1967. He claimed he was physically abused by his older brother as a child. In 1986, when he was 19, he was sentenced to ten years in a detention center for young delinquents for the non-fatal strangulation and sexual assault of five women in the London district of Holloway. King, who always attacked on Monday and Wednesday because he was with his fiancée on the other days, never penetrated his victims because he was sexually impotent. One victim was thrown against the pavement during the attack, resulting in the fracture of her nose and jaw. He was released in 1991 from HM Prison Grendon, where he had undergone therapy to 'address' his offending behaviour, after serving only half of his sentence.

The whole affair is popularly known in Spain as the Wanninkhof Case (Caso Wanninkhof). Vázquez's conviction has been named as the biggest miscarriage of justice in the judiciary history of Spain since the 1910 "Crime of Cuenca".