Tony Alexander King: Where Is Rocio Wanninkhof's Killer Today?
Tony Alexander King's crime spree began when he was still a teenager in North London's Holloway district. The area is now known for its multicultural and commercial attributes, but had some of the highest poverty rates in London when he was growing up. In the sometimes rough-and-tumble neighborhood, there was a string of attacks on women in 1985, in which the victims were strangled and sexually assaulted. With no leads, the media named the attacker "The Holloway Strangler," per the Daily Mail. They didn't know they were looking for King.
Back then, King went by his birth name, Anthony Bromwich. After five weeks, he was finally caught and was convicted at the age of 19 of choking five women unconscious with either rope or cable, and then sexually assaulting them. The judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison, calling him a "monster" for carrying out his crimes due to his own sexual inadequacies, the BBC reported. He served only half of his sentence and was granted parole in 1991, but was right back in prison in a matter of weeks for robbing a woman at knifepoint. Bromwich was re-released in 1993.
Tony King's fresh start doesn't last long
Looking for a fresh start, he changed his name to Tony King, married Cecilia Pantoja, and the two had a daughter. But before long, King was back to his old ways. In August 1997, he was caught on surveillance cameras threatening to rape a Hungarian woman at knifepoint at a train station in Southeast England, according to Yahoo! News. When the footage was featured on TV, he fled to Málaga in the south of Spain to avoid arrest, where he lived and worked under the radar.
Two years later, on the night of October 9, 1999, Rocío Wanninkhof Hornos, a teenager from Mijas, Málaga, Spain, went missing. She left her boyfriend's place to take a shower before plans to meet him and other friends. She never made it. The next day, her shoes were found by her mother, along with a pool of blood in a nearby lot, per the Daily Mail. Three weeks later, her remains were found nearly 20 miles from her home. Wounds indicated she had been beaten badly and stabbed nine times.
Police arrested the wrong person
Under increasing pressure, the police searched for a motive and a suspect and settled on María Dolores "Loli" Vázquez (pictured above), the former lover of Rocío's mother. Even with two alibis and no evidence against her, the police arrested Vázquez a year after the murder, on October 7, 2000, according to Distractify. With nearly no jury deliberation, she was found guilty of murdering Rocío Wanninkhof and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
In August 2003, 17-year-old Sonia Carabantes disappeared from outside her home under similar circumstances. Her parents discovered her shoes, purse, and phone not too far from the house. Her blood was also found at the scene. Carabantes' body was found days later buried under some large rocks, per the Irish Times. She had been beaten and strangled to death. This time, there was useful evidence. Investigators collected biological material from under Sonia's fingernails. The DNA profile matched DNA evidence from a cigarette butt collected in the Rocío Wanninkhof case.
It was King's ex-wife, Celia, who would soon make a break in the case, coming forward to share her suspicions about her former husband, per The Sun. Her gut told her that Tony was involved in Rocío's murder, and, with her help, the police were able to connect a number of dots.
Tony Alexander King was arrested and convicted
King was arrested, and his DNA matched the samples collected from both of the crime scenes. He was soon put on trial for the murders, but insisted on his innocence, saying to the astonishment of the prosecutors, the judge, and the jury, "If it had been me, with my bulk, I would have managed to rape her."
In 2005, King was sentenced to 36 years in prison for the kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder of Sonia Carabantes, and was ordered to pay the victim's family the equivalent of about $350,000, according to El Correo. He was also given an additional seven years for the attempted rape of a woman in Málaga in 2001. The following year, he was also found guilty of killing Rocío Wanninkhof, and he received an additional 19 year sentence. Before his trial, King sent letters to the mothers of Sonia and Rocío asking for forgiveness. He has since claimed that he is innocent of the crimes. Per SUR, King is now serving out his sentence at Herrera de la Mancha maximum security jail in Ciudad Real in Spain.
This story is the subject of the Netflix documentary "Murder by the Coast," now streaming.