Serial rapist deported to Mexico, then extradited to US, convicted of brutal 2002 Washington cold-case murder

A man who was deported to Mexico, then extradited to the US last year after DNA linked him to a 2002 cold case, has been found guilty of murdering a Washington state woman and raping three others.Miguel Urbano-Vazquez was convicted Tuesday by a Pierce County jury of aggravated first-degree murder in the rape and strangling of 39-year-old Sharon Van Gilder, whom he picked up at a Tacoma bar 24 years ago, the News Tribune reported.The jury also found him guilty of first-degree rape with a deadly weapon and second-degree rape in attacks on three other women that same year in the city.Van Gilder was the first victim in a string of violent rapes between March and October 2002, Pierce County prosecutors said during his trial, according to the News Tribune.The mother of two was last seen leaving the Golden Rooster Tavern with Urbano-Vazquez and another man that March.Hours later, her naked, battered body was found dumped on a county road with his DNA inside her, prosecutors said.The killer’s violent spree was only getting started.That June, he picked up a 34-year-old homeless woman hitchhiking to Seattle and took her to a garage, where he bashed her over the head with a wrench and raped her as she bled, prosecutors said.In August, he and two other men raped and beat a 29-year-old woman in the same garage.Two months later, he and a younger man picked up a 40-year-old woman at a bar, slit her throat and raped her in an alley, according to the News Tribune.It would be about a decade before detectives linked Urbano-Vazquez to Van Gilder’s murder and the violent rapes, after DNA evidence from the crime scenes matched him in 2012 and a local arrest warrant was issued that October.But investigators soon learned the serial rapist had already been deported to Mexico, according to the FBI.It is unclear when or why he was deported.His exact whereabouts remained unknown until 2019, when investigators finally pinpointed his location.Four years later, in March 2023, the FBI arrested...