Joaquín Ferrándiz Ventura

Ferrándiz was born in Valencia, Spain in 1963. He was the first of three siblings.

Ferrándiz's first crime took place on August 6, 1989, when he deliberately run over a 18-year-old woman motorcyclist named María. The crash was non-fatal but the victim broke her ankle. Ferrándiz exited his car and approached the victim, pretending to be sorry and inviting her to board his vehicle with the excuse of driving her to a hospital. Once inside, he took her to an isolated place and raped her, abandoning her near the hospital later. Ferrándiz was identified by another motorist who witnessed the "accident".

Ferrándiz was arrested and sentenced to fourteen years in prison for the crime. During his whole incarceration, he shared his cell with another criminal who had killed his wife; after his release, Ferrándiz imitated the modus operandi of his cellmate in his own murders. In 1995, he was paroled following a campaign by his friends and family that claimed his innocence and decried his interment as unjust. His good behavior during his time in prison, when he collaborated in the prison newsletter La Saeta, was cited as a reason for his early release.

After his excarceration, Ferrándiz moved to Castellón de la Plana with his mother and worked in a car insurance company. His coworkers described him as "absolutely normal", polite and charming. Ferrándiz committed all of his later crimes during weekends, in party areas in and around the city of Castellón.

Sonia Rubio Arrufat, a 25-year-old English teacher, was last seen leaving a Benicàssim disco that she had attended with friends, at 5:00 AM on July 2, 1995. She intended to walk the one kilometer distance between the disco and her parents apartment in Benicàssim but she never reached her destination. Her body was found by a motorist on November 20, hidden in the bush near the road between Benicàssim and Oropesa del Mar. She was half-dressed, her hands were tied and her mouth was covered by duct tape. The Spanish Civil Guard codenamed the investigation of Rubio's murder Operación Bola de Cristal ("Operation Crystal Ball").

In September 1996, 22-year-old Amelia Sandra García Costa disappeared after leaving a disco in Castellón. Her body, also bound and half-dressed, was found in a pond of Onda in March 1997. Her murder was immediately related to Rubio's due to many similarities between the victims and the circumstances of the murder. In February 1998, Ferrándiz attempted to replicate the 1989 attack with another woman motorist, but the victim escaped after biting his finger and gave his description and part of his car plate to the police. With this information, the Civil Guard launched an operation to monitor Ferrándiz. They noticed that he visited regularly an area of Castellón called "Los Cipreses" where there was a high nightclub concentration, and that he acted strange there, as if he was stalking different women. It is believed that he did not know any of his victims personally, but that he watched them for a long period before striking. Ferrándiz attempted another attack in July, when he deflated the tire of a woman's car before she left a nightclub. The woman suffered a non-fatal car crash, but Ferrándiz could not abduct her as he had intended. This incident was witnessed by plain-clothes Guardia Civil officers who arrested Ferrándiz in his office a few days later, on July 29. A parallel search found the duct tape roll used to gag Sonia Rubio in Ferrándiz's home, tying him to the first crime.

Ferrándiz initially admitted to the rape of two women, but he denied any killing. He was charged with Rubio's abduction, sexual assault and murder. By October 21, however, he had admitted to killing Rubio, García and three prostitutes whose skeletonized bodies were found in a riverbank near Vila-real in early 1996: Natalia Archelos Olaria (24), Mercedes Vélez Ayala (18), and Francisca Salas León (24). These three murders had been investigated as related to each other, but not to Rubio's or García's, and a truck driver had been arrested as a suspect. Several psychiatric evaluations of Ferrándiz diagnosed him as a psychopath.

Prosecutors requested 163 years in prison with the recommendation that Ferrándiz be never paroled again, and a fine of 200 million pesetas to compensate the families of all five victims. In addition, they also petitioned that the State be named secondarily responsible for not keeping Ferrándiz under the necessary surveillance after he was excarcerated. On January 14, 2000 Ferrándiz was found guilty of five counts of murder, one of attempted murder, and another of imprudence resulting in injuries. Ferrándiz was sentenced to 69 years in prison and to compensate the families with 130 million. The State was acquitted.

Ferrándiz's crimes were loosely adapted into a third season episode of TVE's crime anthology series La Huella del Crimen, titled El asesino dentro del círculo ("The murderer within the circle").