Elena Gocmen Rueda
IT was a murder case that transfixed Spain, and the UK, for decades.
The alleged slaying of a teenager by her mother’s lesbian lover followed by the arrest – and later conviction – of a British expat, who moved to Spain having changed his name by deed poll.
It is little wonder the country became gripped with every twist and turn of the Rocio Wanninkhof saga.
Now the case has been studied under a microscope in a six-part documentary that has had unprecedented access to many of the key characters.
The HBO drama, Dolores, The truth about the Wanninkhof case, attempts to reconstruct the case using archive footage.
It also includes exclusive access to the first suspect Dolores Vazquez, who now lives in the UK, as well as the mother of the dead girl, based on the Costa del Sol.
Rocio, who was half Dutch and half Spanish, was brutally murdered just metres from her home in Mijas in 1999.
Her body had turned up a month later in Marbella, burnt and apparently sexually assaulted.
Billed as being one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Spanish history, the series studies the involvement of Vazquez, who grew up in the UK, but moved to Spain to work in the tourist industry.
It also looks in detail into the lifestyle of Rocio and her mother – who still believes she is guilty – as well as the emergence of her convicted killer, Tony King, who became known as ‘The Costa Killer’.
The story stunned the British media, particularly after it emerged he had changed his name from Tony Bromwich, who was better known as the ‘Holloway Strangler’ back home.
Until he was arrested over the death of a second teenager, Sonia Carabantes, in 2003, Vazquez had served 17 months in prison for the murder of Rocio.
“I owe my life to Sonia”, she claims in the documentary, because without her subsequent death, she would have ended up serving her 15-year sentence.
The film directed by Tania Ballo has put the murder case back on the table, sharing Vazquez’s story and painting her out as the ‘third victim’.
But there are still many answered questions, in particular, the belief of the jury in the Tony King trial that he was ‘not acting alone’.
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