Policeman who clubbed his lawyer to death with own baton found dead in jail

A Granada police officer accused of clubbing his lawyer to death with his baton has been found dead in his prison cell in Albocàsser jail in Castellón province. Miguel Folgoso is believed to have taken his own life by hanging himself with a belt on Sunday afternoon.

The 37-year-old local police officer had been sent to the jail while awaiting trial for the killing of Granada lawyer Rosa Cobo on September 20. Folgoso killed the 51-year-old lawyer by clubbing her around 40 times in the head, neck and chest because he thought she had favored his ex-wife during the couple’s divorce proceedings, leaving him unable to see his baby daughter.

Folgoso had admitted killing Cobo but said he had not wanted to murder her. But on Saturday EL PAÍS had revealed it had had access to a video showing the officer carrying out the murder.

Several weeks before her death, Cobo had installed a security camera in the parking garage of her apartment block after finding her car had been damaged and the tires punctured. But rather than capturing someone smashing up her car again, the camera ended up recording the moment of her own death at the hands of an obsessed ex-client who had lain in wait in the shadows behind a concrete column.

The video shows the lawyer being savagely beaten until she was left unconscious in a pool of her own blood

EL PAÍS decided not to publish the video because of the extreme nature of the images caught on camera, which show the lawyer being savagely and repeatedly beaten until she was left unconscious in a pool of her own blood in the darkness of the garage. The paper published some still images from the recording.

Cobo’s body was later found in the trunk of her incinerated car on a stretch of waste ground on the outskirts of Granada. The corpse had been blackened by the smoke and there were burn marks on her feet. It also showed the signs of being hit around 40 times by an extendable police baton. Some of the lawyers on the case believe the blows had been made with a L-shaped tonfa, a weapon withdrawn from police use in 1996 because of its dangerousness. One such weapon, stained with the victim’s blood, was later found in Folgoso’s car.

Folgoso was arrested the day after the crime close to the town of Guadix, 59 kilometers outside Granada. Civil Guard officers found him inside his car with foam around his mouth and 150 grams of tranquillizer pills in his stomach, having tried to commit suicide.

Folgoso’s ex-wife had needed psychological treatment after fleeing the family home with her baby daughter and taking refuge in her parents’ house in Motril, Granada. After that, Folgoso began targeting all his in-laws: following them silently down the street, puncturing tires, scratching their cars and getting into fights with them in the street. In total his ex-wife, her parents and her siblings had filed 13 complaints against him.