Murder of Rocío Wanninkhof and wrongful conviction of Dolores Vázquez

Rocío Wanninkhof, a 19-year-old Dutch-Spanish woman, disappeared on the evening of 9 October 1999. She left her boyfriend's home in La Cala de Mijas around 21:30, intending to walk the 500 metres to her own home in the "La Cortijera" area of Mijas, Málaga province, on Spain's Costa del Sol, before meeting friends at a fair in Fuengirola; it was the only time she made that walk home alone. When she failed to appear at the fair, her mother, Alicia Hornos, and Hornos's partner Juan Cerrillo went looking for her the next day and found a pair of running shoes, a napkin, and blood stains near the road. The Civil Guard cordoned off the site; a blood trail, drag marks, and tyre tracks indicated the body had been moved by more than one person. DNA testing on 16 October 1999 confirmed the blood was Wanninkhof's. Her nude body was found on 2 November 1999 near a sports club between Marbella and San Pedro de Alcántara, disfigured and partially decomposed. An autopsy found she had been beaten, then stabbed nine times with a single-edged blade; sexual assault could not be confirmed given the condition of the remains.

Investigators focused on María Dolores "Loli" Vázquez, the former partner of Wanninkhof's mother, who had helped raise Rocío and her siblings after the couple separated in 1988. Amid intense media coverage that branded Vázquez a "dominant," "predatory" lesbian, a jury convicted her of the murder even though most of the factual evidence exculpated her; the prosecutor instead attacked her character and her past relationship with Hornos, and the verdict repeated the prosecutor's allegations almost word for word. Vázquez was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Three months later, the High Court of Andalusia overturned the conviction and ordered a retrial.

On 14 August 2003, 17-year-old Sonia Carabantes disappeared in Coín, Málaga, after her mother, Encarna Guzmán, found her daughter's sandals, purse, and phone next to a blood stain in the street. Carabantes's body was found on 19 August 2003, naked and covered with stones; an autopsy determined she had died of asphyxiation. DNA recovered at the scene matched evidence from the Wanninkhof murder, and further testing traced it to Tony Alexander King, a British national living in southern Spain. Vázquez's retrial was postponed on 18 September 2003 after the discovery of this new evidence, and the case against her was later closed; all charges were dropped and she was formally cleared on 2 February 2005, having spent 17 months in prison.

Tony Alexander King, born Anthony Bromwich, had a criminal record in the United Kingdom that included a 1986 conviction for the non-fatal strangulation and sexual assault of five women in London and a later robbery for which he was imprisoned until 1996. After his release he changed his name and married Cecilia Matilde Pantoja; in 1997, after he was identified from a CCTV recording of an attempted rape at Leatherhead railway station, King and Pantoja fled to Málaga, where he later worked as a real estate agent and then at a local pub. In 2005, King was sentenced to 36 years in prison for the murder of Sonia Carabantes and a further 7 years for an unrelated sexual attack; in 2006 he was found guilty of the murder of Rocío Wanninkhof and sentenced to an additional 19 years. Despite Vázquez's exoneration and King's convictions, Hornos has said publicly that she still believes Vázquez was involved in her daughter's murder. Vázquez's wrongful conviction has been called one of the most significant miscarriages of justice in Spain's modern judicial history.