Fuming mum burned daughter’s rapist alive after sick taunt (Image: MAX)
A mother who came face to face with her 13 year old daughter’s rapist enacted a brutal form of vigilante retribution. In 1998, María del Carmen García dispatched her young daughter, Verónica, to fetch bread from a bakery in Benejúzar, a municipality in the Valencian Community, Spain.
Verónica regularly undertook these trips and would stop to visit a stray dog en route. Yet, on this occasion, when she called out for the dog, it did not emerge.
Rather, she experienced the hands of local bricklayer Antonio ‘Pincelito’ Cosme, 62, upon her shoulders. The “man of few words” brandished a knife and warned Verónica he would kill her if she uttered any sound.
Cosme dragged the terrified girl towards some trees, despite her frantic pleas. Following the rape, Verónica begged him to spare her life.
As Gema Peñalosa chronicles in her book “Fuego” (Fire), he responded: “I’ll let you go, but if you tell your mother, I’ll slit your throat with a ‘corvilla’ [an agricultural tool].”
She returned home, having given him her word she would remain silent, but instantly informed her mother. María seized a knife and set off to face her daughter’s attacker.
Veronica spotted the rapist at a bus stop (Image: MAX)
Gema writes: “That Saturday in October, after ‘Pincelito’ raped Verónica, Mari Carmen […] crossed the street without looking both ways and headed toward Antonio Cosme’s house, a knife in her hand.”
María pressed the doorbell repeatedly until Cosme appeared wearing his pyjamas, claiming he had only just awoken and categorically rejecting the appalling allegation. She refused to accept this, shouting: “You don’t deserve to live! You son of a b****. You son of a b****!”.
María was accompanied home by her neighbours, and news of the incident circulated swiftly across the community. Disturbingly, certain residents supported Cosme, implying the family were trying to extract money or that his age rendered the claim implausible.
Nevertheless, a medical examination verified that semen was detected and there had been wounds compatible with sexual assault. The trauma rendered it entirely impossible for the family to remain living in the same neighbourhood.
They moved to a different part of town and, 12 months later, DNA evidence matched Cosme. His trial began in October 2000, and by December that year, he had received a nine-year prison sentence.
Cosme maintained his innocence and submitted an appeal, but it was eventually rejected. Five years later, in June 2005, María was standing at a bus stop when a vehicle drew up and a man emerged.
He addressed her: “Good morning, ma’am. How is your daughter?” It was Cosme, who had been granted – without her awareness – temporary release. María was petrified, dreading he might one day fulfil his threat to kill her daughter.
María fled to a nearby petrol station in search of a jerry can, yet none of sufficient size was available. She hastily returned home to retrieve a one-and-a-half-litre bottle and a box of matches.
Having filled the bottle with petrol at the same station, she made her way to the bar where Cosme was eating breakfast. “Do you remember me?” she demanded.
“So you won’t forget me!”.
María doused him with the petrol and ignited it. The flames swiftly consumed Cosme, who “began to burn like a torch, from head to toe”.
The rapist suffered burns to 60% of his body and died 10 days later.
She was subsequently admitted to the psychiatric unit of Fontcalent penitentiary hospital. At her trial in 2009, she said: “I didn’t want to kill him; I wanted to scare him so that he would leave and never come near my family again.”
Verónica told reporters: “If his [Cosme’s] family had acknowledged that he raped me and had let us live in peace, what is happening now would never have occurred.
“But you cannot damage a person to such an extent. My mother has been undergoing psychiatric treatment since the very day I was raped, and she still is […] Things would have been different if there had been a restraining order.”
She was handed a sentence of nine and a half years, placed under a restraining order and ordered to pay damages to the man’s family. In 2010, this was reduced to 5.5 years, and she was subsequently transferred to Fontcalent.
In November 2017, she was allowed to complete the rest of her sentence at home, at first returning to prison every evening before subsequently being fitted with an electronic tag. María was ultimately released on parole and freed in August 2018.
