Rafael Márquez Centeno was born in Teruel back in 1976, visiting different reform and reception centers for the Government of Aragon. His first destination was the disappeared Lorenzo Lostale de Huesca, where he ended up after the social services saw that the family in which he lived was not the most prone. Her parents had separated and, while her mother lived with several men and did not pay her the pertinent attention, his father, with problems of alcoholism, raped him at the age of six. A mark that led him to kill a sixty-year-old in Huesca and shortly after a thirty-year-old in the Zaragoza town of Pina de Ebro. Now he remains in prison, although he has little left to get out.
A report from his first school, back in 1988, already classified him as “a border lines that, despite reaching middle school, he could not pass primary school”. The study stated that the adolescent “has lied in all the centers where he has been”. From the age of 16 he was in the Hogar San Francisco of Paula, where a psychological report dated March 18, 1993 highlighted that he was a young man with “concerning behaviors and psychological imbalances” and highlighted again his tendency to fabrication. “He comes to believe his own lies,” he added. Months later he committed his first murder. It was the summer of 1994 and at number 28 Desengaño street in the Alto Aragonese capital The taxidermist, Manuel Zapater Carilla, 67, was found dead. Márquez murdered him with an axe. After committing the crime, he stole his car and contacted two other young people in a bar, who had to travel to Teruel, and offered to take them.
If it hadn’t been for the traffic offense committed by the criminal behind the wheel, the discovery of the body would have been different. When the Civil Guard stopped the vehicle in which the three young people were traveling and verified that none of the three owned the car, they became suspicious, trying to call the taxidermist, but he did not pick up the phone so they went to the victim’s home. Located in the Tubo Huesca. He was dead on the sofa while he rested in front of the television.
“He came to try to abuse the children and he also wanted to do it with me”
The three were immediately arrested, although only Márquez was provisionally sent to prison, who initially confessed to the crime, but later changed his statement and alleged that he had been forced to incriminate himself.
He offered a version that was questioned during the trial. According to the young man, the taxidermist used to visit the Lorenzo Lostale center when he was an intern. “He came to try to abuse the children and he also wanted to do it with me,” he testified to imply that he tried to get revenge.
Already in the trial at the Huesca Court, Márquez stated that he did not want to kill him, but that he did it “in self-defense” when he wanted to rape him. He added that, first, he stabbed him with a knife and badly injured him, but the victim had him by the leg and used an ax to finish him off.
So many changes of version and inconsistencies, and the fact that he was recognized as a “pathological liar” that led the court not to admit the fact of the alleged rape by the victim, because the murderer and the deceased had had consensual sexual relations by mutual agreement for several weeks. The defendant himself acknowledged these facts, although he stated that the murdered taxidermist caused him “revulsion.”
marquez He was sentenced to 26 years for murder, but he appealed to the Supreme Court, which reduced his sentence to 20 years, by applying a mitigation of mental disorder.
Luck was on his side, as he did not spend long in prison. Only nine years. He accepted the old Penal Code, which contemplated redemption of sentences for work, and obtained conditional release on January 24, 2003, after passing through the prisons of Daroca, Alcalá 2, Logroño and Zuera.
his second murder
On his release from prison, he ended up in Pina de Ebro. There he committed his second crime. He killed Pedro Luis Jabato Crespo, 35 years old and of Basque origin, inside his home located on Calle del Sol. who resided in this Zaragoza municipality because he had found work in the industrial estate.
Inside the house, Márquez hit his victim, Pedro Luis, on the head with a marble figure. he provoked him serious injuries to the skull and was followed by others to the face and body and an attempted strangulation that caused Jabato’s larynx to rupture. Later, Márquez tied his victim’s hands and feet to a bed, leaving him in a semi-conscious state.
As he did with his first victim in Huesca, he fled from the scene of the crime in his victim’s car, from whom he stole a bank card, mobile phone and house keys, which is why he has also been convicted of a crime of motor vehicle theft and one offense of larceny. The Civil Guard found Crespo several days later, in an agony state, and transferred him to a health center where he died shortly after due to the seriousness of the injuries he sustained.
On April 27, 2004, Márquez was arrested. He then stated that he killed Pedro Luis in a role-playing game in which he received the death token. “And in the role they don’t like fags,” he sentenced on that occasion. He also said that when he visited his victim’s apartment, she complimented him non-stop. The night of the events, Márquez took the victim’s credit card and 280 euros, as well as his car, with which he broke down when he was on his way to Saragossa.
A confession that, as in the case of Huesca, he tried to invalidate. “I confessed guilty because the Civil Guard beat me to death,” he said at the oral hearing in which he was defended by the lawyer Pedro Santisteve – who years later was mayor of Zaragoza -. He argued during the hearing that, although he was at the scene of the crime, the perpetrator of the murder was a third person, Ben Ali, a Maghrebi who was expelled from Spain.
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The person in charge of the Judicial Police of the Benemérita who directed the arrest of Márquez, assured that the crime of Pina and that of Huesca “are two identical photocopies.”
For all these reasons, the magistrates of the Provincial Court of Zaragoza that they imposed a sentence of 23 years in prison for the crime of murder.