A Pierce County jury has convicted a serial rapist of aggravated first-degree murder for a 2002 cold-case killing, closing a hunt that spanned two countries and more than two decades.
Miguel Urbano-Vazquez, whose DNA finally tied him to the crimes in 2012, was found guilty Tuesday of murdering Sharon Van Gilder, 39, and raping three other women during a violent spree in Tacoma, Washington. The verdict came roughly 16 months after FBI agents tracked him to a city outside Mexico City and extradited him back to face charges.
Urbano-Vazquez picked up Van Gilder at the Golden Rooster Tavern in March 2002, prosecutors told jurors. Hours later, her naked and battered body was discovered dumped on a county road, with his DNA recovered from her remains.
The killing marked only the beginning of his attacks that year.
That June, Urbano-Vazquez picked up a 34-year-old homeless woman hitchhiking toward Seattle and drove her to a garage. There, he bashed her over the head with a wrench and raped her while she bled, prosecutors said during the trial. Two months later, he and two other men raped and beat a 29-year-old woman in the same garage. In October 2002, he and a younger man picked up a 40-year-old woman at a bar, slit her throat and raped her in an alley.
The other men involved in those attacks were never caught, prosecutors confirmed.
Detectives linked Urbano-Vazquez to Van Gilder’s murder and the rapes in 2012, when DNA from the crime scenes matched his profile. A local arrest warrant was issued that October. But investigators learned he had already been deported to Mexico, and his exact whereabouts remained unknown until 2019.
In March 2023, FBI agents arrested him in Chimalhuacán, roughly 22 miles east of Mexico City. He was extradited to Pierce County last year to stand trial.
More than 20 years after the attacks, the surviving victims took the stand and recounted hours of captivity and being raped by multiple men.
Van Gilder’s family expressed deep gratitude to those women for their testimony, saying their bravery helped secure the conviction.
“We hugged them, told them we loved them, told them that it wasn’t their fault, and thank you for being so brave to tell their stories,” Brenda Doty, Van Gilder’s cousin, told KOMO News. “Every one of them said, we’ve always prayed for you too, that we would get justice.”
Doty said the family was relieved that “this monster can never hurt anybody again.”
The jury also convicted Urbano-Vazquez of first-degree rape with a deadly weapon and second-degree rape for the attacks on the three surviving women. It remains unclear when or why he was originally deported to Mexico.
Urbano-Vazquez is set to be sentenced Dec. 11 and faces life in prison without parole.