A room lined with plastic and a corpse spread out in bags: the Málaga killer who was inspired by ‘Dexter’

The first time the Civil Guard spoke with him, the suspect was clear:

—It wasn’t me. You have nothing against me. And I know you can’t prove it because I have a lot of free time and I’ve watched CSI and many other police series.

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The second time the agents contacted him, he broke down. They already had more information and evidence to charge him with the murder of a friend that occurred six years earlier in Coín (Málaga, 26,574 inhabitants) and he himself admitted it. He also mentioned another series, Dexter, whose protagonist covers the crime scene with plastic to avoid leaving traces of his murders. He did the same in his house before dismembering the corpse over several days and then wrapping each part in a bag that he put inside another and then in a third along with the latex gloves he had used.

Later he said he had distributed each package in different points around the Pinos de Alhaurín residential area, in Alhaurín de la Torre. There, the Homicide Group of the Málaga command searched on Tuesday for the victim’s remains with the support of specialized dogs without results. Nothing was found.

The agents who carried out the investigation that led to the arrest of the alleged killer, 65 years old, say it was a job with many difficulties. And the main one is time, because the disappearance of the victim, Francisco José Agüera, 59 years old, occurred in April 2020, during the COVID health crisis lockdown. The complaint from his family was investigated: lodgings and flights were checked, verifications were made.

However, it was declared low risk because Agüera was an adult, led a bohemian life, and his leaving voluntarily was not ruled out. For more than five years nothing changed. There were no new complaints, nor further investigations. Only a SOS Missing poster with his photo and a request to report any clues to find his whereabouts.

Everything began to change in June 2025, when a municipal worker found a skull in a plastic bag hidden in a manhole of a plot next to the Pinos de Alhaurín residential area. “When you find something like that, you know there is violence behind it because the body could also fit there… And it wasn’t there,” sources close to the case explain. The problem was that, without knowing its identity, it was impossible to start an investigation. Also, the first forensic analysis concluded that the bone features pointed to it being a woman. “That misled us a lot,” the investigators say.

The turning point came in early 2026, when the criminalistics service certified that the remains belonged to Agüera thanks to a complex genetic analysis. The Civil Guard Homicide Group quickly got to work, but with a six-year disadvantage. “A lot of time had passed since the crime and that complicated any step,” the same sources say, who found it practically impossible to reconstruct the deceased’s last hours or know who he had been in contact with in those days.

The first thing was to interview many people around the victim: friends, acquaintances, and family. The second was to narrow the search to a series of possible suspects. And that’s where the first alarm went off. The manhole where the skull had been found was very close to the house where the sister of one of Agüera’s friends lives. The investigators thought they had him, their intuition told them it had to be him, but they still had no way to prove it. When they went to talk to him, they noticed hesitation in his answers that confirmed their suspicions, but he denied being the killer. Then he clearly responded that he had seen many series and that they had nothing against him.

“You won’t find anything”

The Civil Guard then relied on patience and also on judicially authorized technological means. It is the invisible work that agents prefer not to talk about to avoid giving clues to suspects, but from which an evident result about the authorship of the crime was obtained. Then the specialists contacted the man again, who already broke down and confessed. He assured, however, that it had all been due to a fight because he believed his friend had stolen from him. He had a struggle in his own house and, according to the alleged killer, he fainted, fell on top of the victim, and suffocated him. It is a theory that the Civil Guard, however, does not believe.

What they did believe was what happened next: that the aggressor weighed what to do with the corpse until he decided to get rid of it as he had seen the protagonist of Dexter do. He covered practically his entire house with plastic and, over several days and with rudimentary methods, dismembered the body. Then he wrapped each part in a bag that he put inside another and inside a third along with the gloves he had used to handle that area.

Finally, he distributed the bags in several areas of the Pinos de Alhaurín residential area. He transported them in his car, whose interior he had also wrapped in plastic with three layers so that no biological remains were found. And that despite a forensic analysis team studying the vehicle thoroughly for three days, during which they did not find “a drop of blood, nor a hair, nothing,” according to the investigators, to whom the alleged killer warned: “No matter how much you look, you won’t find anything.”

Advised by his lawyer, the man accompanied the Civil Guard to Alhaurín de la Torre to indicate the places where he had left his friend’s remains. One of them was a small cave that took five hours to locate. His torso has also been found, from which they intend to extract information about the cause of death.

Other points have been ruled out because residential developments have been built over them. “A final effort must be made to try to find the remains. For the investigation and also for the family,” says one of the specialists who has worked on the case, pointing out that it has been an “ant-like” labor that has allowed, as in the series, to finally catch the killer, now in prison accused of homicide.

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