Murder of Ángeles Rawson

Ángeles Rawson was a 16-year-old high school student living with her mother, her mother's partner, and her siblings in a ground-floor apartment at 2360 Ravignani Street in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She attended the Virgen del Valle Institute in Colegiales and was known for her interest in Japanese culture, including anime, manga, and cosplay.

On 10 June 2013, Rawson was last seen alive entering her apartment building at 9:50 a.m., an image captured on CCTV security cameras. Her body was found the next day, 11 June 2013, by a municipal worker at a garbage processing plant in General San Martín Partido, a suburb of Buenos Aires, wrapped inside a large supermarket bag. An autopsy determined that she had been strangled and suffocated, and that her killer had attempted to rape her. She also suffered five fractured ribs, a fractured right clavicle, and a fractured vertebra.

The Argentine Federal Police quickly began investigating, questioning the building's doorman, Jorge Néstor Mangeri, about the last time he had seen Rawson. Investigators ruled out involvement by Rawson's mother and stepfather and focused on Mangeri, challenging inconsistencies in his account. On 15 June 2013, after viewing CCTV footage, Mangeri confessed to the killing. He later claimed he had been kidnapped and tortured by federal police and that his confession had been coerced. Neighbors described Mangeri as generally well-regarded by tenants, though some accused him of harassing women and making sexual propositions to former female employees in the building.

Because confessions alone are not legally sufficient for conviction under Argentine law, Mangeri's guilt was ultimately established through DNA evidence showing that Rawson had scratched and injured him — more than 34 injuries were documented on his body — while resisting the attack. Investigators determined that Mangeri lured Rawson to an unseen area of the building, attempted to rape her, and killed her by strangulation and suffocation within about five minutes when she resisted. He left her body at the scene for roughly five hours before placing it in a garbage bag, using his car to transport it to a nearby garbage container.

Mangeri's trial concluded on 15 July 2015, when Buenos Aires City Criminal Court No. 9 sentenced him to life imprisonment. The sentence was upheld on appeal by the Court of Cassation in 2017, and the Supreme Court finalized the appeals process in 2018, confirming the life sentence. Mangeri is serving his sentence at the Rawson Federal Prison in Chubut Province and continues to maintain his innocence.

In a related case, Cecilio Antonio Saettone, a cousin of Mangeri's wife and a former member of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, was convicted in December 2017 of perjury for advising Mangeri to falsely claim he had been tortured by police during the appellate process. Saettone was sentenced to four years in prison, escaped before arrest, had his sentence upheld on appeal in December 2020, and was recaptured and imprisoned in September 2023.