Murder of Rocío Wanninkhof

Common card · No. 431489

The murder of Rocío Wanninkhof occurred on 9 October 1999. Wanninkhof, a 19-year-old Dutch-Spanish woman, disappeared in Mijas, Málaga, Spain, a town located on the Costa del Sol. Three weeks later, Wanninkhof's stabbed and partially decomposed body was found. Amidst popular pressure and a media circus characterized at times as a "public lynching" of the accused, a jury trial convicted 52-year-old María Dolores "Loli" Vázquez, the ex-girlfriend 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 behaviour due to her Galician extraction and traditional British comportment, being dissonant with local social norms, attitudes and expectations. Three months after Vázquez's conviction, the...

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