A Spanish family searching for a missing 42-year-old woman uncovered something investigators had apparently overlooked: the man who had been traveling with her, and who was actively inserting himself into the search, was a convicted serial killer who had served nearly three decades in prison for four murders.
Esther Estapa vanished in the summer of 2023 while traveling across Spain. Nearly three years later, the man last seen with her has been convicted in a separate killing, while her own case still awaits trial.
Strange Messages, Then Silence
At about 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 23, 2023, Esther’s mother, Peppa Perez, began receiving a series of unusual messages from her daughter’s phone. In them, Esther said she had run out of money, admitted she had not always been honest with her mother, and claimed she was living on the streets with two Argentinian women. She also said she planned to leave Spain and start a new life in Argentina.
To her mother, none of it sounded like Esther. Repeated calls to her daughter’s mobile phone went unanswered. Peppa asked for a voice message or a brief video call — anything to confirm who was actually typing. No reply came.
She turned to her other daughter, Raquel, who reached the same conclusion after reviewing the messages: the spelling was unusual, the phrasing unfamiliar, and the word choices were not ones Esther used. As the evening wore on, more messages arrived with increasingly odd errors. Then they stopped altogether, and Esther’s phone was switched off.
Esther had lived a nomadic life since leaving Seville in 2013, rarely staying anywhere longer than a year. Dropping off the map geographically was normal for her. Cutting off daily contact with her mother was not.
Peppa reported her missing. Because Esther was an adult who had a legal right to disappear, officers initially suggested she may have left voluntarily. The family pressed on, pointing to the odd messages and the sudden silence.
Esther’s history added urgency. Her family said a previous relationship had turned severely abusive — she was allegedly confined at home with the blinds closed and no key when her partner left, and was assaulted and burned with cigarettes. That partner was arrested in 2022 on domestic violence charges, and Esther was placed in a women’s shelter in Alicante. She left the shelter, describing the strict rules as another form of confinement, and resumed traveling. She later told a former partner, Marcelo, that she had met a man who documented long walks across Spain on TikTok and had invited her to travel with him.
A Companion Who Would Not Stay Out of the Search
On Sept. 8, two weeks after Esther disappeared, Peppa received a phone call from that traveler: José Hurtado Montilla, born in 1961 outside Málaga, who posted on TikTok as “Dynamiter Montia” and had built a following of several thousand with videos of his long-distance walks.
Montilla said he had met Esther at the Alicante shelter, that they traveled together from Alicante to the coastal city of GandÃa, and that they had parted ways there. He said police had contacted him three days earlier. He spoke at length about their 21-day friendship, told Peppa he had never met anyone like her daughter, and said he still thought about her often.
In later calls, his behavior struck the family as unusual. He repeatedly asked how the police search was progressing, whether anything had been found, and whether someone else might be involved. When Peppa mentioned the case was being transferred to the homicide division in Alicante, Montilla — who had said he was in Málaga with little money — announced he would return to Alicante, retrace their route, question people they had met and search for her himself. He urged Peppa to have faith and dismissed her fear that something terrible had happened.
Much of investigators’ early information came from Montilla himself. He sent Peppa a screenshot of Esther’s contacts, explaining she had briefly used her SIM card in his phone. That list led police to two friends, Miguel and Vanessa, who confirmed Esther had stayed with them for roughly 20 days before leaving Alicante.
Vanessa began working through Montilla’s TikTok account. In one video, he casually described an old argument in which he said he had smashed a man’s face in and knocked out his teeth. Others described nights he said he had spent with Esther. Over time, his accounts of their last hours contradicted one another: in one version he accompanied her into a health center in GandÃa; in another they separated on a bench and she went alone; to Peppa he said friends collected her afterward — though Esther had never been to GandÃa and had no known friends there.
What the Family Found Online
When Esther’s mother and aunt searched Montilla’s name, they found a 2013 news article identifying him as a convicted serial killer who had served decades in prison for four murders — the 1985 shooting of 57-year-old farm owner Francisco González, the 1987 death of 46-year-old former chauffeur Antonio Peral, and the killings of two young campers, one British and one German, near El Chorro that same year. He was arrested in May 1987 and sentenced to 123 years.
Under Spain’s former sentencing rules, that total was capped at 30 years of actual imprisonment. In 2013 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that a later doctrine on sentence reductions could not be applied retroactively, requiring Spanish courts to recalculate release dates. Montilla walked free in December 2013 after 28 years.
The family took the article to police, who according to the family responded that they must have the wrong José Montilla — their records showed only a theft conviction. The family says officers told them, “This man wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Unknown to them, investigators were separately pursuing Montilla in another case: the August 2022 shotgun killing of a 21-year-old man, David, on a remote Málaga property. Before his death, David had told his father a stranger claimed to be hunting foxes that killed his chickens — the same explanation Montilla gave in 1985. DNA recovered from David’s backpack zipper produced no direct match, but a familial search and family-tree reconstruction pointed to Montilla. Detectives tracked him through his own TikTok posts, collected discarded cigarette butts, and arrested him in a bar he had publicly named online, minutes after the lab confirmed a match.
On Feb. 2, 2024, a tour guide walking through disused drainage tunnels near Bayren Castle in GandÃa found a human skull. In June, the family learned it was Esther’s. A later search of the area recovered more than 60 bones and several of her possessions.
Investigators say a doctor recalled seeing Esther that night with a man matching Montilla’s description; she had an injured foot, argued with staff about staying overnight, and left with him at 12:30 a.m. Records showed the messages sent from her phone had used Montilla’s mobile hotspot, as did a second activation in December. A crucifix-shaped impression on her skull matched a silver crucifix found in his possession, and photographs of her body were found on his phone.
On June 10, 2026, Montilla was sentenced to 24 years and six months for David’s murder — 20 years for the killing and the remainder for robbery and illegal possession of a shotgun — making David the fifth person he has been convicted of killing. He has not been tried in Esther’s case and denies any involvement in her death.
