The Devastating True Story Behind The TikTok Killer

0:00So imagine for a second that you've chosen to travel solo. Oh, yeah, just completely off the grid. Right. You've packed a bag, you know, you've left behind a life that maybe just wasn't working for you anymore. And you are finally feeling that elusive sense of just complete freedom. That's the dream, right? Exactly. The open road is yours. Your schedule is your own. And for the people who love you back home, the only way they really know you are safe is the specific sound and rhythm of your text messages. All right, because you aren't there physically. Yeah. It's the way you type, you know, the specific emojis you use or the cadence of your daily voice notes. It's basically a digital heartbeat. That's a great way to put it. But like, what happens when that heartbeat suddenly changes? I mean, the messages keep coming, yes, but the voice inside them, the phrasing, the detail, it is suddenly just chillingly wrong. Right. The phone is alive, but the person holding it is a total stranger. It completely shatters that illusion of safety, you know?

1:01The safety that our constant connectivity supposedly provides. Yeah, totally. Because we have this really ingrained assumption that well, because a message arrives from a loved one's device, it is inherently from that loved one. Yeah. But text is just raw data. Right, it doesn't have a face. Exactly. It has no face. It has no physical signature. When you strip away like the vocal inflection or videophied, a text message is incredibly easy to hijack. Yeah. And when someone does hijack it, they buy themselves the absolute most valuable currency in any investigation, which is time. Wow. Yeah. And that nightmare of a hijack digital heartbeat become an absolute reality for the family of a 42-year-old woman named Esther Estepaperas. It's just a tragic case. It really is. And we are pulling from a massive stack of sources today for this deep dive for you. We've got investigative articles, police and court records, and a lot of profound insights gathered around the recent Netflix spain documentary called The TikTok Killer. Directed by Hector Winyanti, right?

2:01Right. Exactly. And the mission for this deep dive is to reconstruct this really specific fragmented trail. It reveals not just how a woman vanished, but how a convicted multiple murderer used the modern internet to rebrand himself. Yeah. Is this folksy wanderer? Exactly. Exploiting both like legal loopholes and social media algorithms. Well, and to understand how all of these elements collide, we really have to look closely at the mechanics of the systems involved. Yeah. We are going to be dissecting the phenomenon of the voluntary disappearance by us in law enforcement. Which is fascinating. It really is. And we'll look at the intricacies of European sentencing structures and the rapidly evolving science of genetic genealogy. Right. There's so many moving parts. But at the center of all this data in legal philosophies, Esther, her daily habits, her specific way of moving through the world is the baseline we have to establish to understand the sheer magnitude of what went wrong. Right. So let's talk about the baseline.

3:01Who was Esther before she crossed paths with this man? The sources we looked at describe her as lively and deeply restless. But there is a really specific context to her nomadism. It seems crucial to how the police eventually perceived her. Yes. Esther was from Seville, and she was a survivor. OK. She had recently escaped an allegedly abusive relationship, which actually required her to spend some time in a women's shelter just to stabilize her life and get her bearings. Right. To find some solid ground. Exactly. OK. And following that trauma, she made a very deliberate choice to reclaim her autonomy by adopting an nomadic lifestyle. So it wasn't just a random vacation? No, not at all. She moved through Spain, staying at hostiles, doing seasonal work, and just taking these long walks. This wasn't a weekend getaway. This was her chosen mode of existence. Wow. And she didn't do it alone, which is key. She traveled everywhere with her two dogs. Which means she had anchors. I mean, she might not have had a lease on an apartment or a standard nine to five job, but she

4:02had non-negotiable responsibilities. Precisely. The dogs are a critical anchor. But honestly, the most important anchor was her mother, Josef Apparraz, who goes by Peppa. OK. So she and her mom were close. Incredibly close. Esther spoke to Peppa every single day. Every day. Every single day. Meet the media might shift, right? Sometimes it was WhatsApp messages, sometimes voice notes or video calls. But the contact was absolute. Wow. OK. And that daily communication is basically the control group in this experiment. When you have a pattern, that rigid. Any deviation is mathematically significant. So we have this woman moving freely, but highly tethered to her mother digitally. And we reach mid-August 2023. She's staying at a hostel in Elecante, which is on the southeastern coast of Spain. Right. And this is where the variables change. Because she meets a man named Jose Horado Montia. Now, the sources indicate he's in his early 60s. And he's presenting himself as a travel content creator. The TikToker. Right. He has a TikTok presence under the name Denyada Montia.

5:04And I'm just trying to picture what is 60-something travel influencer on TikTok even looks like to someone staying in a backpacker hostel. Well, if you look at the mechanics of social media curation, it's all about building a specific archetype. OK. How do you mean? Montia wasn't trying to be a glamorous influencer, with ring lights and pristine clothes. He curated the archetype of the weathered wise elder of the trail. Oh, like a nature group, real. Exactly. His feed was full of walking routes, rugged, Spanish landscapes, and these folksy, philosophical monologues about human kindness and the beauty of nature. That is so creepy in hindsight. It really is. But the TikTok algorithm rewards authenticity, or at least the performance of it. So for someone staying in a hostel, encountering an older man who openly documents his travels and talks about the beauty of the open road. It just automatically lowers their defensive barriers. Completely. It provides a plausible, publicly documented reason for him to be exactly where he is doing exactly what he's doing.

6:05It is like a digital character witness. He doesn't need someone to vouch for him because his profile does it. And it clearly worked on Esther because she actually appears in some of his footage from that time. She does, yeah. They strike at this companionship. And on August 22, they decide to do a massive hike. 37 kilometers from Denea toward Gandhiya. Which is intense. Yeah, a 37 kilometer walk in the Spanish summer heat is grueling for anyone. And the medical records show that by the end of the day, Esther is in severe physical distress. Right. She has a badly swollen leg and a severe headache. And that physical toll is important because it really dictates the next documented event. The distress is severe enough that Montia actually calls emergency services. OK. And ambulance is dispatched. And Esther is transported to a hospital in Gandhiya. And we have the admission and discharge papers for this. So there's a clear paper trail. Exactly. She receives medical treatment, which includes an injection for her symptoms. And she is officially discharged at roughly 4.30 in the morning

7:08on August 23. That 4.30 AM timestamp is basically the precipice. Because after she walks out of that hospital, no one who actually knows her ever hears her actual voice again. Never again. But the phone doesn't die. 13 hours after that discharge, Pepe's phone lights up with messages from Esther's WhatsApp. And the content of these messages is just completely unmoored from reality. It's bizarre. Right. The texts claim she is completely broke, living on the street with two Argentine friends she just met, planning to sell her phone for cash, and moving to Buenos Aires to start a new life. Yeah. And when you analyze those messages from a perspective of linguistic forensics, the deviations are glaring. So obvious. Because a perpetrator, hijacking a communication device, has a specific narrative goal. They must explain the impending permanent silence of the device. Oh, I see. The inclusion of Argentine friends and a move to Buenos Aires is an intercontinental misdirection. Right. It's designed to explain why a physical search in Spain

8:09would be totally useless. Exactly. And the claim that she is selling her phone is the mechanical excuse for why the daily voice notes will permanently cease. It's a digital ransom note written in her own font. That's exactly what it is. It's just screaming that someone else is holding the device. But when PEPA takes this to the police, you know, sounding the alarm that this isn't her daughter, the investigation doesn't instantly ignite into a massive manhunt. No, it doesn't. The sources mentioned that law enforcement categorized it as a voluntary disappearance. Help me understand the mechanics of that decision. How does a mother report that her daughter's digital identity has been stolen to fake her own disappearance and the system responds with a shrug? Well, it really comes down to bureaucratic triage and the statistical matrices that law enforcement agencies use to allocate resources. Matrices, like a checklist. Sort of, yeah. Police department's process and overwhelming volume of missing persons reports every single day. So to manage this, they apply risk profiling.

9:10OK, that makes sense. If a minor vanishes, the risk profile is categorized as critical, triggering immediate mobilization. Right, obviously. But if a 45-year-old accountant with a mortgage, a spouse, at a regular 9-5 job, fails to show up for work and leaves their car running in the driveway. That's a massive disruption. Exactly. The disruption of their rigid, daily physical routine flags the disappearance as highly suspicious. But Esther doesn't fit that matrix at all. She doesn't have a lease. She doesn't have a 9-5. Exactly. When you input the data of a 42-year-old adult who already lives transiently, who moves from hostile to hostile, and whose phone has just transmitted a message, explicitly stating an intention to move to another country. The system just sees someone moving on. Right. The algorithm of the bureaucracy defaults to autonomy. The foundational assumption of the legal system is that adults have the right to walk away from their lives. Wow. So Esther's hard-won independence, the very nomadism

10:11she used to heal from her past trauma, it inadvertently placed her in a category that blinded the triage system to her peril. That is so sad. It is. The system relies on physical routine to detect disruption. It struggles immensely to quantify a mother's intuition regarding digital tone shifts. That is deeply frustrating. So the family officially files a missing person's report on August 26, 2023. And operating under this voluntary disappearance bias, the police do initiate an investigation. But their first major move is to check on Esther's ex-partner, the one she had previously accused of abuse. Now, I understand that the partner is usually the prime suspect, but considering the wild text messages about Argentina, why the tunnel vision on the ex. Again, it's a matter of statistical probability guiding the investigated mechanics. In homicide and missing person's cases involving women, the statistical likelihood of intimate partner violence is overwhelmingly high. Yeah, that is statistically true. It is standard operating procedure,

11:12often referred to as the proximity rule, to clear the inner circle before expanding outward. So the police interrogated the ex partner, they verified his movements, and established a solid alibi. Furthermore, records indicated that the conflict between them had actually de-escalated in the month's prior, so he was definitively ruled out. So they clear the ex boyfriend, and they are still operating under the assumption that she might have just hopped a flight to Argentina. Yeah. And the case really threatens to become just another dusty file. But then the perpetrator does something that seems completely counterintuitive to getting away with murder. That's wild. On September 8, roughly two weeks after Esther Vanish, Pep is phone rings. And the man on the other end introduces himself as Jose Horado Montia. He volunteers the information that he was at the hostel, that they hiked together, and that he took her to the health center. The psychology of a perpetrator inserting themselves into the active orbit of a victim's family is a really complex mechanism. I just don't get it. Well, on the surface, it appears reckless.

12:15But operationally, it serves multiple strategic purposes for the killer. First, it is an aggressive intelligence gathering maneuver. Oh, like he wants to know what they know. Exactly. By calling the mother directly, he opens a conduit to monitor the investigation from the inside. He can gauge what the family knows, what the police are communicating to them, and whether the geographic focus is shifting toward him. He's basically tapping his own wires. Exactly. He's bypassing the police to get updates directly from the source of the panic. But he didn't just call. He started sending them his TikTok videos, videos featuring Esther, videos of them walking, videos of him looking deeply concerned about her disappearance. And that is the secondary purpose, the performance of transparency. Wow. By voluntarily providing digital evidence of their association and acting the part of the distressed friend, he is attempting to inoculate himself against suspicion. Like hiding in plain sight. Exactly. The psychological gamble is that a guilty man would sever all ties and flee, whereas an innocent companion

13:16would be helpful and present. He is using the curated trust of his TikTok persona and weaponizing it directly against the grieving family. I'm just trying to wrap my head around the sheer arrogance of that gamble. He assumes they will just accept this performance blindly. But Peppa and Esther's sister, Raquel, are operating on a completely different frequency. They completely reject the police's narrative of a voluntary move. They know Esther would never abandon her two dogs. Never. And now, thanks to his own narcissism, they have a name. So around January 2024, they do what any of us would do. They open Google. And the digital footprint is unforgiving. When the family searched the name Jose Huerado Montilla, the search engine didn't prioritize a harmless travel vlog. It surfaced the historical archives of Spanish journalism. It revealed his aliases, Dina Mita Montilla, and El Pitti. It exposed a sprawling documented history that identified the man texting them not as a concerned hiker, but as a convicted serial killer

14:16from the 1980s. I cannot fathom the physiological reaction to that moment. I mean, you are sitting at a computer desperately searching for a thread that leads to your missing daughter. And the screen tells you that the last man to see her alive is a documented monster. It's a living nightmare. The instinct would be to scream, to call the police, and demand they kick his door down, to text him and confront him. But they didn't do any of that. No, they didn't. And their restraint is an absolute masterclass in counterintelligence. They understood the fragility of their position. How do you mean? If they confronted him, if they exhibited anger or fear, they would burn their only bridge. A man with his history would immediately recognize the shift in tone, discard the phone, vanish into the transient underground, and sever their only tether to Esther's final known movements. Oh, that makes so much sense. So they made the agonizing decision to maintain polite contact. That is so brave. They thanked him for his concern. They absorbed his performative videos. They effectively became their own undercover operatives

15:19to ensure the trail remained warm, while they tried to force the authorities to look closer. To understand what the family found in that Google search, and to really grasp the absolute failure of the system to protect Esther, we have to pull the timeline all the way back to the 1980s. We do. We have to look at the mechanics of Montias' original crimes. The source's detail, a spree of extreme violence between 1985 and 1987 in the Malaga area of southern Spain. What was his methodology back then? His operational methodology in the 1980s was defined by geographic isolation and just overwhelming ballistic force. OK. He was born in 1961, and by his mid-20s, he was utilizing the rugged rural terrain of the Malaga province as a hunting ground. In November 1985, a 57-year-old man named Francisco Gonzales was found shot to death in an isolated rural farmhouse, a cortillo in Almogia. The source is note that this specific killing is the only one Montia ever partially admitted to, right? Years later, in interviews, he framed it as an accident.

16:22He claimed he was high, outhunting foxes that were bothering chickens, and the gun just went off impulsively during a confrontation. Feels like a very calculated admission to me. It is. It's a highly calculated narrative technique known as minimization. Minimization. Yeah. By admitting to the mechanical act of the shooting, but stripping away the predatory intent, he presents himself as a victim of circumstance and substance abuse rather than a cold-blooded killer. Wow. OK. It provides an illusion of accountability. He technically confesses, which satisfies a public desire for a confession, but he firmly rejects the label of a serial predator. He's aggressively maintained his innocence regarding the subsequent murders. But the subsequent murders are undeniable. I mean, in March 1987, a 46-year-old man named Antonio Paniagua is found dead in a country house in Campanillas, and his body is semi-charred. Right. Investigators' tie items found on Montiae directly to that scene. And then it escalates in May 1987. Two tourists, one British and one German, are camping near the Caminito del Rey Gorge.

17:23They are found brutally murdered, showing both severe gunshot and knife wounds. It was a horrific escalation. So he's finally apprehended on May 4, 1987 in Olora. He goes through the judicial process and is convicted of all four homicides. And the courts hand down a sentence, totaling 123 years. Now, when you or I hear a number, like 123 years, the natural assumption is permanent removal from society. The math implies he will die in a cell. Right. And that is the perceptual friction between public expectation and the actual mechanics of penal law. Explain that for me. So the 123-year figure is a cumulative total of individual sentences for each crime. However, the Spanish penal system at that time, and honestly, this is common in many European civil law jurisdictions, operated under a constitutional framework focused on rehabilitation, rather than purely punitive vengeance. OK, so it's a different philosophy entirely. Exactly. The law stipulated a hard, maximum cap on the actual time a person could serve in a continuous block, which was 30 years.

18:26Wait, help me understand the math here. If the hard cap is 30 years, and you are sentenced to 123 years, does that mean that after a certain point, every additional murder you commit during a spree essentially carries no additional penalty? Because you've already hit the ceiling. Functionally, yes. That's insane. But once the cumulative sentences exceed the 30-year threshold, the excess years do not translate to additional physical days in a cell. They exist on paper, but the physical detention is capped at 30 years. OK. But the mechanics become even more complex when you introduce sentence reductions. Good time credits earned through work programs, educational courses, or general good behavior. OK, so let me get this straight. If the cap is 30, and you earn, say, 10 years of good behavior credit, does that mean you walk out in 20 years? Despite having 123-year sentence. Historically, yes. Oh my god. The prison system applied those good time credits directly against the 30-year maximum cap rather than against the 123-year total accumulated sentence.

19:26This meant that prolific offenders could reduce their actual time served significantly below the 30-year ceiling. I can imagine people were furious about that. Well, this mechanism caused massive public outrage, particularly regarding convicted terrorists in the ETA separatist group, who were accumulating hundreds of years in sentences, but facing the prospect of walking free after 20 years. Which brings us to the legal mechanism mentioned in the sources, the parrot doctrine. It sounds like the Spanish Supreme Court looked at this math and realized it was completely broken. Exactly. To rectify this perceived loophole, the Spanish Supreme Court established the parrot doctrine in 2006, named after an ETA member on Reparo. OK. The doctrine changed the mathematical formula. It mandated that good time credits must be subtracted from the total accumulated sentence, the 123 years, rather than the 30-year cap. OK. I see the logic there. What? If you have 123 years and you earn 10 years of credit, your sentence drops to 113 years. Exactly. Which means you are still infinitely far above the 30-year limit,

20:28ensuring you actually serve every single day of that 30-year maximum. It closes the loophole. It effectively neutralized the benefit of good time credits for mass casualty offenders, ensuring they serve the absolute maximum permitted by law. And for a while, this doctrine kept Montia and dozens of other serious offenders securely incarcerated. But the doctrine faced a profound legal challenge at the international level. In 2013, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg reviewed the parrot doctrine and actually struck it down. On what grounds? I mean, if the goal is to keep serial killers in prison, why would a human rights court intervene? Well, it's important to understand. The European Court's ruling was not a commentary on the morality of the offenders. OK, what was it about then? It was a strict interpretation of the principle of legal certainty and the prohibition of retroactive punishment. Retroactive punishment. Right. The court rule that Spain had changed the mathematical rules of sentencing after the crimes have been committed and the original sentence is handed down. Ah, I see.

21:28The fundamental human rights protocol dictates that a prisoner must be subject to the penal laws as they existed at the time of the offense. By retroactively applying a harsher calculation method, the court argued Spain was violating the prisoner's fundamental rights to do process. So the philosophy being that the state cannot bend the rule of law just because the public despises the individual, the math has to be blind, even if the result is terrifying. That is the exact core friction. Now, as impartial observers of this material, we have to look at both sides. Legal purists argued that allowing the state to retroactively change sentences erodes the foundation of a fair judicial system. Right. Because if they can do it to them, they can do it to anyone. Exactly. But critics of the Straussburg decision pointed to the immediate, tangible danger. They argued that applying standard rehabilitative metrics to the Sittivist serial killers is a fatal administrative error. Yeah, that makes sense, too. They warned that striking down the pair doctrine

22:28would force the release of individuals who possessed zero potential for rehabilitation, basically prioritizing abstract legal theory over the physical safety of the public. And the physical reality of that ruling is that the prison doors literally swung open. Because the old math was reinstated, the good time credits were applied to the 30-year cap again, and Montitas time was considered fully served. So in December 2013, after serving 28 years of a 123-year sentence, he walks out a free man. And the transition from a highly controlled, maximal security environment to absolute freedom is jarring. Records indicate he spent his first night of freedom sleeping under a bridge. Wow. He spent the next decade living in a tenorant lifestyle, moving through rural areas, essentially picking up the nomadic threads of his youth. But he also engaged in a really sophisticated reputation laundering campaign. You mean the newspaper interviews? Because he actually spoke to the press after his release, really. He did. He leveraged the public fascination with his release

23:30to craft a very specific narrative. He reiterated his partial confession for the 1985 shooting, painting it as a tragic mistake of a drug-addled youth. But fiercely maintained his innocence regarding the other murders. He framed himself as a victim of a corrupt judicial system that needed a scapegoat. Classic manipulation. Completely. He presented himself as a man who had suffered greatly, paid his debt, and was now just seeking peace in nature. Which is the exact foundation of his eventual TikTok persona. He spent a decade perfecting the character of the wronged wise wanderer in print before he ever picked up a smartphone to broadcast it. Exactly. And the tragedy is that the critics of the Strasbourg ruling were entirely correct about the danger. If we look at the timeline provided in our research, Montias' release didn't just culminate in Esther's disappearance in 2023, he had already reverted to his violent baseline the year prior. The timeline is totally unforgiving. In August 2022, exactly one year before Esther vanishes in Elecante, we are brought back

24:31to the Los Montes de Málega region. Which is the exact geographic profile of his 1980s hunting grounds. Yes. A 21-year-old computer engineering student named David H travels to a rural plot of land owned by his family to check on some carabtries. Just a normal day. It is a mundane solitary task in a deeply isolated area locally known as Losiegos. And David never returns. And the next morning, his body is discovered. And the scene is just a brutal echo of the past. It's not a sophisticated modern crime. It is an execution. It is. He is shot in the back of the neck with heavy shotgun slugs, and then shot again in the head at close range with pellets. The motive occurs entirely financial, but petty, his phone, his wallet, and his keys are taken. A young man's life is extinguished for pocket change in the middle of nowhere. This crime scene exposes the fundamental paradox of Montias' operational methodology in the modern era. Oh, so. He relied on the identical tactics he used in 1985, seeking out the geography of isolation.

25:32He targeted a solitary individual in an environment devoid of witnesses or CCTV cameras, utilizing overwhelming ballistic force. Right, doing what he knew worked. Exactly. He trusted the silence of the rural landscape to protect him, just as it had decades prior. But he failed to comprehend the invisible microscopic revolution that had occurred in forensic science during his 28 years in a cell. He thought he was playing the same game, but the board had completely changed. Because the police didn't need a witness this time, they found a microscopic piece of evidence on the zipper of David's backpack. Yes, they recovered a mixed DNA profile from that zipper. Which is incredible. It really is. In the 1980s, touched DNA. The microscopic shedding of skin cells left behind simply by handling an object was basically science fiction. But in 2022, it is standard procedure. Exactly. The laboratory technicians extracted this profile and ran it through codists, the National Police Database. But it wasn't a direct hit, was it? The sources say it matched a paternal relative.

26:35I'm trying to visualize how you go from a zipper swab to identifying a killer who isn't even in the immediate system. Well, this is the intersection of traditional forensics and the rapidly advancing field of genetic genealogy. OK, break that down for me. When a direct match fails, investigators can utilize specialized DNA phenotyping and familial searching. In this case, the analysis of the Y chromosome, which has passed down almost unchanged from father to son, indicated a familial link to an individual who was in the system. Oh, I see. But the genetic distance suggested the common ancestor was generations back. So they have to build a family tree backward to find the split and then trace it forward to find the suspect. Precisely. The laboratory staff collaborated with genealogy experts. They utilized public census records, burst certificates, and marriage registries to build a sprawling genealogical map that stretched back 150 years. 150 years. That is insane. They are tracking lineages through the late 19th and entire 20th centuries.

27:35It is an exercise in extreme painstaking triangulation. That is mind blowing. A 150-year genealogical map built off dead skin cells left on a backpack zipper. And the complexity of this specific tree was staggering because they actually encountered deliberate optuscation. Deliberate? What do you mean? The genealogical trail led them to a specific branch. But the suspects identity was masked by a legal name change that had occurred during childhood. Oh, wow. Yeah. So the investigators had to locate the obscure legal documentation of that name change to connect the genetic lineage to the modern identity. When the math was finally complete, the triangulation pointed squarely at Jose Huerado Montia. But knowing his name and actually finding a man who lives entirely off the grid, sleeping in rural areas and moving constantly are two entirely different things. I mean, a DNA match gives you an arrest warrant, but it doesn't give you GPS coordinates. Right. And that is where the second fatal flaw of Montia's modern existence betrayed him. The DNA identified him, but his digital narcissism located him.

28:36Ah, the TikTok account. Exactly. Montia used TikTok not just as camouflage, but as a source of narcissistic supply. He craved an audience. He wanted to be seen and validated as this wise, traveling figure. The social media platforms operate on data extraction. Yeah, they know everything. Every time he uploaded a video, he wasn't just broadcasting his face. He was broadcasting his digital location. Because of geo-tagging, even if the video is just a generic shot of a tree or a dirt path, the app is recording the metadata. The exact time the video was taken and the geographic coordinates of the device when it connected to the server. Exactly. So investigators didn't have to launch a massive resource heavy physical manhunt through the mountains of Andalusia. They simply monitored his digital footprint. That's so poetic. They analyzed the EXIF data and the geo-tags from his recent uploads to narrow down his trajectory. And on May 16, 2024, the police tracked a digital ping to a local bar in Valdabodua,

29:36a small town in the province of Badajo, near the Portuguese border. And they just walked in. They walked in and arrested him. The very platform he utilized to build his disguise provided the precise telemetry required to dismantle it. The irony is just astounding. You have a killer utilizing a 1980s analog methodology, a shotgun in an empty field, being dismantled by 21st century microscopic genetics and social media server pings. Yeah, it really is a clash of arrows. And the justice system moved relatively swiftly on this one. Earlier this year in 2026, a jury in Molliga convicted him of the murder of David H. He was sentenced to 24 years with the court citing aggravating factors of recidivism, the use of weapons and robbery. And that conviction solidifies his status as an active lethal threat. But the arrest in May 2024 served a secondary equally vital purpose. Bringing it back to Esther. Yes, it forced the judicial apparatus to refocus its resources on the agonizingly stalled case of Esther Estepa.

30:36Remember Esther vanished in August 2023. By the time Montia is arrested for David's murder, Esther's family has been waiting in the dark for nine months, maintaining that polite, terrifying correspondence with him just to keep the pressure on. Exactly. And tragically, the renewed geographic focus on the route they hiked yielded the outcome the family had been dreading. With Montia in custody, investigators intensified the search along the path from deniah to Gandhi. Yes. And in February 2024, slightly before his official arrest, but as the net was tightening, a highly significant discovery was made. What was it? A human skull was located near a canal by Baron Castle in Gandhiia. A location perfectly aligned with the trajectory of their hike. It took several months for the forensic analysis to be completed. But by June 24, 2024, DNA testing definitively confirmed that the skull belonged to Esther. The timeline of the discovery is harrowing. The skull is found in February, but the area clearly holds more secrets. Because in June 2024, hikers in the same general vicinity

31:36stumble upon more remains. Bones are found scattered in a dense, read bed, heavily hidden in the undergrowth. This is nearly a year after she vanished. The environmental exposure must severely limit what investigators can definitively prove. It does. The science of tephony, the study of how organisms decay and become fossilized, or in forensic terms, how environment affects biological remains. Please a massive roll here. OK, how so? Well, a body exposed to the elements in a rural Spanish environment for 10 to 12 months undergo severe degradation. The remains are subjected to animal scavenging, which causes the scattering of bones and extreme elemental weathering. Right. All soft tissue, which is required to prove things like strangulation or precise time of death, is entirely gone. But the bones still tell a story, don't they? The sources indicate that authorities informed the family of some specific forensic findings. Yes. Despite the degradation, the skeletal structure retains a permanent record of extreme trauma. The forensic anthropologists identified

32:38a severe fracture on the skull, consistent with a massive blunt force blow to the head. Oh, wow. This finding transitions the case definitively from a missing person's inquiry to a homicide investigation. The family also stated that authorities suggested the possibility of a sexual assault prior to the murder, though proving that definitively in a court of law, without soft tissue or DNA transfer, is an immense forensic hurdle. And Montaser's response to all of this total denial. Completely. He vehemently denies any involvement in Esther's death. He claims they parted ways after the hospital. He is currently sitting in prevented attention facing two distinct homicide charges. He has already been convicted and sentenced for David. But the trial dates for Esther's murder are still pending. And the pending nature of Esther's trial creates a very specific boundary for the documentary we referenced, the tick tock killer. Right, because they can't show everything. Exactly. Director Hector Mugniente and his team faced a difficult, ethical, and logistical landscape.

33:39Because the case is active, law enforcement cannot release the entirety of their investigative files or crime scene photos without jeopardizing the upcoming prosecution. May sense. So the documentary cannot rely on the standard true crime procedural format of revealing police secrets. But doesn't that limitation actually force a more interesting approach? Since Mugniente couldn't build the documentary around police interviews, he had to build it around the digital artifacts left behind. Yeah, he really did. He talks about locking himself in an editing suite and obsessively watching hours upon hours of Monte E's tick tock footage. And it forces a psychological, almost voyeuristic approach. Mugniente's analysis of the footage is chilling. I can imagine. When you consume tick tock content casually, scrolling quickly, Monte E's performance holds up. He seems like a slightly eccentric, chatty older man. But when a filmmaker isolates the footage, slowing it down and searching for the narrative seems, the performance fractures. The micro expressions, right? The sources mentioned the ticks in his videos.

34:40Exactly. Mugniente highlights the micro-second emotional switches that betray the psychopathy beneath the surface. You see a warm, folksy smile that absolutely fail to engage the muscles around the eyes. Oh, that is terrifying. You witness a momentary drop of the mask. A sudden, dead-eyed coldness that washes over his face when he finishes his sentence. Right before the charm is violently forced back into place for the next take. It is the digital preservation of a predator constantly adjusting his camouflage in real time. It is a profound reminder of the danger of passive consumption. True crime media frequently falls into the trap of mythologizing these figures. We assign them catchy nicknames. We hyperfixate on the brutality of their methods. And inadvertently, the victim becomes a secondary character in the killer's grand narrative. Yeah, that happens a lot. But the documentary refuses to do that. It makes a highly deliberate choice to keep Esther at the absolute center of the frame. It refuses to elevate Montia into some sort of dark, charismatic, folk devil.

35:42And that editorial choice anchors the tragedy in reality. It serves as a stark counter narrative to the current culture of internet sleuthing. Oh, for sure. We are constantly inundated with stories of viral red-threads cracking cold cases or crowdsourced TikTok armies analyzing background audio to find missing people. It creates a false comfort that the internet will save us. Right. But the resolution of this case did not come from viral speculation. No. It came from the absolute refusal of a family to accept the path of least resistance. It was a mother who looked at a text message and knew in her bones it was a lie, flatly refusing to accept a closed police file that categorized her daughter as a voluntary runaway. Yes. It was a sister who had the terrifying courage to Google a stranger's name and then maintain a polite correspondence with a serial killer for month just to keep the threat alive. It is the triumph of grueling analog persistence over systemic apathy. Perfectly so. The bureaucratic triage system failed Esther.

36:44It required the relentless pressure of Peppa and Raquel combined with the invisible painstaking labor of laboratory technicians swapping zippers and genealogists tracing 19th century census records to finally force the system to see what was right in front of it. Esther is not a cautionary tale about the abstract dangers of social media or stranger danger. She was a vibrant, fiercely independent woman who survived abuse, loved her dogs, and maintained a flawless digital lifeline to her mother. Yeah, she was. The uncomfortable reality this case exposes is that the massive algorithmic systems designed to protect society, whether it is police risk profiling matrices or European sentencing caps, will often categorize us, process us, and move on long before the people who actually love us ever give up. When you synthesize the sprawling elements of this investigation, you are looking at a collision of errors. Yeah, definitely. You have a predator operating with the blunt, isolated brutality of the 1980s, unwittingly unleashed by a controversial human rights ruling that prioritized retroactive legal theory

37:46over predictive behavioral risk. You have the miraculous undeniable math of genetic gene analogy, and you have the absolute double edged sword of the modern digital landscape. Montia utilized the internet as a hunting ground, right? A mechanism to curate unearned trust and lure isolated individuals by projecting an aura of safety. But the architecture of that same internet, the ceaseless demand for data, the unblinking recording of telemetry, became the map that ultimately guided the police right to his bar stool. For anyone navigating this digitally saturated environment, the core takeaway is a profound re-evaluation of our daily habits. Yeah, how so? We view our digital communication as a convenience, but it is actually a vital safety telemetry system. A message that deviates from the established baseline, a shift in vocabulary, a sudden change in life plans transmitted via text rather than voice, cannot be casually dismissed as a mood swing or a glitch. Right, you have to pay attention. It must be treated as a potential critical failure of that person's safety.

38:46The rhythm of our digital lives is as unique and as fragile as a physical fingerprint. We spend so much time worrying about the longevity of our digital footprint for you listeners out there. We worry about an embarrassing photo from a decade ago resurfacing or an old forgotten email account being compromised. Yeah, the normal anxieties. But looking at the terrifying efficiency with which Montia hijacked Esther's digital heartbeat, I want to leave you with a different kind of technological dread to mull over. We assume our constant 24-7 connectivity is a shield that keeps us tethered to the safety of our network. But when that exact same connectivity allows a predator with a stolen device to perfectly mimic our survival, to digitally perform our existence while we are already gone, does our online life actually make us safer? Or does it just by the person who took it from us a 13-hour head start?