He Killed Four People in the 1980s. Then He Got Out and Built a TikTok Following.
Esther Estepa was 42 years old and starting over.
She had escaped an abusive relationship. She was living in a women's shelter in Mutxamel, on Spain's Costa Blanca, with one plan: stay safe, heal, and eventually go home to her mother in Seville. By September 2023, she was supposed to be back.
She never made it.
In August 2023, Esther set out to meet a man she'd connected with online. He called himself "Dinamita Montilla." He posted travel videos on social media. He seemed friendly, harmless — the kind of middle-aged guy who documents sunsets and hiking trails and talks to the camera like an old friend.
His real name was José Jurado Montilla. And he had killed people before.
Four Murders, 123 Years, 28 Years Served
In the mid-1980s, Jurado Montilla terrorized the Málaga region of southern Spain. His victims were men and women, locals and tourists. A British man and a German man were found shot and stabbed at a campsite in El Chorro in May 1987. A 46-year-old man's semi-burned body turned up on a farm. A 57-year-old was killed inside his own home.
By the late 1980s, Jurado Montilla had been convicted of four murders and sentenced to 123 years in prison. In Spain, that meant he would serve the maximum — 30 years — with his sentence reductions calculated against the full 123.
That calculation changed in 2013.
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg struck down Spain's "Parot Doctrine." This legal framework had applied prison benefits — good behavior credits, time reductions — to the full sentence rather than to the 30-year maximum. Without it, dozens of convicted killers and terrorists had their release dates moved up, sometimes by years. Jurado Montilla walked out of prison in December 2013. He had served 28 years.
He was free. And Spain had no system in place to monitor where he went next.
The Profile That Looked Like a Fresh Start
In the years after his release, Jurado Montilla rebuilt himself online. His travel account showed a man living on the road — hiking, traveling, making small-talk videos to the camera. He called himself "Dinamita Montilla." He had followers. He got comments. He seemed, to anyone watching, like a harmless nomad enjoying his retirement.
That's exactly how it was designed to look.
The profile was a funnel. It started public — videos, comments, likes — and moved private. Conversations escalated from comment sections to direct messages, away from any support network a potential victim might have. Esther's family had no idea she had been talking to him. Nobody did, unless they'd been following Spanish crime news from the 1980s.
He was 62 years old and operating completely in the open, because nothing required him to do otherwise.
August 23, 2023
Esther and Jurado Montilla had been on a multi-day hiking trip together along Spain's eastern coast. By August 20, they were in Gandía, near Valencia. They tried to get a room at a hostel. There was no space. Esther was dealing with a leg injury from the hiking.
On August 23, she was seen with him. She visited a local hospital for her leg. Then her phone went silent. Her bank accounts stopped showing movement. Her social security records went flat.
Shortly after, Esther's mother, Pepa, began receiving strange text messages. They claimed Esther was a "bad daughter" who had never been honest and was suddenly moving to Argentina with friends. Pepa had raised her daughter. She knew immediately the words were wrong — the syntax, the coldness, the story. She demanded a voice call to confirm it was really Esther.
The phone went dead.
Pepa reported her daughter missing to police in Seville.
The Body in the Reed Bed
For almost ten months, Esther's remains sat hidden in plain sight.
Her skeletal remains were found in June 2024 in the median strip between the Gandía beach road and the N-332 highway — a dense thicket of reeds, feet from passing cars, invisible from the road. She had been placed there to stay hidden indefinitely.
Cause of death: a severe blow to the head. Late 2025 findings added a further charge — evidence suggested Esther was alive during a subsequent sexual assault, which significantly raises the potential legal penalties Jurado Montilla faces.
He had been arrested in May 2024, before the body was found. Police tracked him using the digital trail he left on his own social media account — upload timestamps, geolocation data embedded in videos, phone signal pings cross-referenced with surveillance footage. The platform he used to find his victim also led investigators straight to him.
He was arrested in a bar in Valdebótoa, a small hamlet in Badajoz — near the Portuguese border, which investigators believe he was preparing to cross.
This Wasn't the First Time After His Release
While Jurado Montilla was building his online following and meeting women on hiking routes, he was already under investigation.
In August 2022, the body of David, a 21-year-old man, was found in the Montes de Málaga with two shotgun wounds to the head. A Málaga court was actively investigating Jurado Montilla for that murder while he was still posting travel videos and luring Esther. His name is also linked to the 2023 disappearance of an 87-year-old man, Francisco Pérez Bedmar, whose family contacted authorities after learning Jurado Montilla had been in the same area at the same time.
He is now linked to at least six murders. He was released from a sentence for four.
The System That Made This Possible
The Parot Doctrine ruling released dozens of people convicted of serious crimes. It was a legal decision about procedural fairness in sentencing. That is a legitimate legal issue. But the ruling had a predictable consequence that nobody in Spain had planned for: violent offenders with no monitoring requirements, no post-release supervision mandates, and no mechanism to alert potential victims that a man convicted of four murders was now posting travel content online.
Jurado Montilla is a case study in what happens when a justice system treats release as the end of the story.
Esther Estepa was classified by Feminicidio.net, which tracks gender-based killings in Spain, as a victim of non-intimate feminicide — killed by a man she knew only through a screen. In 2023 alone, 103 women were killed by men in Spain. Esther was not a cautionary tale about meeting strangers on the internet. She was a woman who had already escaped one dangerous man, was doing everything right, and was still not safe — because the system that should have prevented this encounter never considered her at all.
The One Person Who Got It Right
Jurado Montilla is awaiting trial as of March 2026. The investigation is still open on multiple cases.
But here's what's worth sitting with. Esther's mother, Pepa, received those fake WhatsApp messages and immediately knew something was wrong. Not because of any system, alert, or app. Because she knew her daughter's voice. She demanded a live call. The phone went dead. She went straight to police.
That instinct — one mother's refusal to accept a cold, wrong-sounding text — is what started the investigation that eventually found the body and put Jurado Montilla back behind bars.
The system didn't protect Esther. A grieving mother's persistence did.
That gap is not an accident. It is a policy choice. And until Spain — and countries like it — decide that monitoring violent offenders after release is as important as sentencing them, Esther Estepa's case will not be the last one like this.
Shambhavi Thakur is an investigative writer covering true crime, health journalism, and systemic failures. Based in Vrindavan, India. Watch the video versions on Crime Beat Daily.
