Alcàsser Girls murders

On 13 November 1992, three teenage girls from Alcàsser, in the Valencia region of Spain — Miriam García Iborra, Antonia "Toñi" Gómez Rodríguez, and Desirée Hernández Folch — set out to attend a school party at a discothèque in the nearby town of Picassent, about four kilometres away. After one of the girls' fathers was unable to drive them because of illness, the three hitchhiked, as they had reportedly done the previous summer. A young couple from Alcàsser drove them to a petrol station near Picassent, where a local resident later reported seeing them get into a sedan — thought to be a white Opel Corsa — occupied by a group of men. It was the last confirmed sighting of the girls alive.

Miguel Ricart was the only person charged in the case. According to a statement he later gave, he and another man picked the girls up at the petrol station; when the group drove past the nightclub the girls had asked for, the girls began to scream and one of the men struck them with a handgun. They drove to a derelict house near the Barranco de la Romana ravine, close to the Tous dam, where two of the girls were raped; after a trip to nearby Catadau for food, the third girl was raped as well. The girls were later forced into an already-dug pit, where the assaults continued. An autopsy found Hernández had suffered a traumatic chest wound from a sharpened object and had been stabbed twice in the back; the other two girls showed injuries from thrown stones and tree branches before all three were shot and buried. García's body also showed wounds from a sharp-edged object, possibly inflicted after death. The men tried to retrieve spent shell casings and clean the vehicle, but investigators later recovered evidence linking them to the scene.

An intensive search began immediately, but the girls' bodies were not found until 27 January 1993 — 75 days later — when two beekeepers discovered them in a ditch near the La Romana ravine after heavy rain disturbed the soil covering the grave. At the scene, Spain's Civil Guard recovered a glove belonging to Ricart, a medical referral document, and a spent shell casing. A national manhunt followed for the second man named in Ricart's account; he was last reported seen in Spain near Minglanilla, Cuenca, before travelling to Lisbon and stowing away aboard a container ship. He is assumed to have died after reportedly going overboard off the coast of Ireland, though his body was never recovered; he was never apprehended or formally charged. Laboratory analysis also found seven hairs on the victims' bodies carrying DNA profiles matching neither the girls nor either of the two men described in Ricart's account.

Ricart was convicted and sentenced to 170 years in prison, though Spanish law at the time capped actual time served at 30 years. He was released in 2013, after 21 years in custody, following a Court of Justice of the European Union ruling that Spain's use of the "Parot doctrine" to limit sentence reductions violated the principle against retroactively increasing a prisoner's punishment. After his release, Ricart lived for a time in the south of France before being identified in Madrid in 2020, when he was reportedly caught attempting to buy illegal drugs. The trial drew heavy televised coverage, and broadcasters' decision to air graphic crime-scene photographs — including images of the girls' bodies — was widely criticised as a violation of the victims' and their families' privacy.