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 him in Chimalhuacán — roughly 22 miles east of Mexico City — and he was extradited to Pierce County last year to stand trial for his heinous crimes.

More than 20 years after the attacks, the surviving victims testified at trial, recounting hours of captivity and being raped by multiple men, KOMO News reported.

The other men involved in some of the attacks were never caught, prosecutors told the outlet.

Van Gilder’s family said they were grateful to the other victims for testifying, crediting their accounts with helping 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.”

As for how they feel about the verdict, Doty said they were happy that “this monster can never hurt anybody again.”

Urbano-Vazquez is set to be sentenced Dec. 11 and faces life in prison without parole.