21 January 2011: Body of missing Arriate teenager found

Jennie Rhodes

Friday, 21 January 2022, 11:27

On 21 January 2011 the news broke that firefighters had found the body of Arriate teenager, María Esther Rodríguez, two days after she had gone missing.

The 13-year-old had left her home at around 7pm on 19 January to meet up with friends at the village bus stop, a usual meeting place for local youngsters. Her friends last saw her at around 9pm, but she never went home.

Surprised that she was not home in time for one of her favourite TV programmes at 10 o'clock, her parents went out to look for her and reported her disappearance at 2am.

The teenager's body was found in a hut housing the pump filter equipment of a swimming pool on the outskirts of Arriate, with signs that she had been hit on the head with a rock.

A 17-year-old from the village, Rubén V. R., was arrested on Thursday 3 February in connection with María's murder. Plain-clothes Guardia Civil officers had entered a house in the centre of the village and reportedly found traces of blood on a trainer belonging to the youth.

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Rubén pleaded guilty during the subsequent trial and was given an eight-year prison sentence and ordered to pay 20,000 euros in compensation to the victim's family.

At the same time, María's parents, Juan Isidro Jiménez and Carmen Villegas, took the decision to leave Arriate, where they had been living since 2007, and return to the town of Paterna de la Rivera in Cadiz, where Villegas was from originally.

Their daughter's murder had "destroyed" their lives, they said. However, they asked local residents to let the parents of the suspect "live" and to "leave them alone".

In May 2015, Rubén V. R. was transferred from a juvenile detention centre to prison, firstly in Alhaurín de la Torre and later to Puerto III, in Puerto de Santa María in Cadiz province, where he served the remaining four years of his sentence.

He was released in August 2019 with a further five years on probation.