“THERE’S plenty of people around here who know him,” said the woman owner of the fruit and vegetable shop at the foot of the block of flats where Francisco Javier Arce Montes once lived.
“The problem you have is finding anybody who’ll talk to you about him.”
This working-class neighbourhood of Gijon, a coastal city in the northern Spanish region of Asturias, collectively prefers to forget that the man, they once knew simply as “Javi”, ever existed.
Montes was born here on March 14, 1950. His father, Geraldo, ran a successful grocery store, the Casa Geraldo. He died in 1997.
Since the arrest of “Javi” three years ago, his family have moved from the flat in a block of grey tenements where he grew up. His relatives hate to speak about him. “We just want to forget about him altogether,” Andres Moro Blanco, who is married to Montes’s sister Blanca, told The Times.
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“Every family has its black sheep and we regret it, but you do not choose your relatives. We have been very distressed by the girl’s death and we share the pain of these parents who have lost their daughter.”
In a statement to the court in Rennes, Montes’s elderly mother disowned him and said that she had moved out of her home when he returned there in 1996 after Caroline’s murder.
“I could not stand living with him any more,” said Benigna Montes, 87, who added that she was afraid of her son. The family said that they had pleaded with a Spanish judge to keep him in prison after he was arrested at the seaside resort of Llanes, ten miles west of Gijon, for attempting to rape a 19-year-old girl at knifepoint in 1997.
Montes’s mother and sister went to the court to make the plea, the family said. But in November of the same year, after spending only three months in prison, he was bailed. He failed to report to the police, as ordered, on the 15th and 30th of each month and in December 1998, when his trial date came round, he did not show up.
An arrest warrant was immediately issued but by then it was too late. The first news that the Spanish authorities had about his whereabouts was when he was arrested in Florida.
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His mother had previously made three complaints to police in Gijon that her son had threatened her with violence, although he had never actually attacked her.
While being held in prison in Villabona in Asturias, before his release on bail, Montes wrote a letter in which he accidentally revealed his modus operandi. He wrote: “I do not know how anyone could think I could rape someone. It is all lies from that girl in Llanes and the police.
“I have had a lot of girlfriends here, they could tell you about me. The last one was A (the rest of the name had been deleted) and she loved me a lot. When we made love she knew that she had to take a shower before.
“At my request she always brought with her a bottle of alcohol and some cotton wool to clean her breasts before I would touch her and also to wash myself with afterwards.
“You know how scrupulous I am, how disgusted I am with the food and other things in prison. I know that the bit with the cotton wool was very painful for her but it had to be done.” Montes allegedly used cotton wool to smother Caroline Dickinson as he attacked her.
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He was known in his neighbourhood for his peculiar behaviour. He wore his trousers belted high above his waistline and he spoke in a soft, effeminate manner.
One Spanish report quotes an unnamed neighbour as saying that Montes once said to him: “Women are all whores.”
Former friends said that Montes was known in the city for chasing after young girls and while there in 1997 had produced a picture of Caroline and boasted of having seduced her.
Montes complained of a difficult upbringing not least because he was a difficult person. His relationship with his mother and sister was poor. He blamed them for everything that went wrong in his life. He had even accused his mother of poisoning his food.
“He was a loner, but a pretty good smooth talker,” said one teenage acquaintance quoted by El Mundo. He left home as soon as he could, but regularly returned whenever his money ran out. “His family was a financial cushion that he could always fall back on.”