I met Rosa Peral in April 2017. She was an agent of the Urban Police who denounced a superior for having leaked a sexual photograph of both of them and there were only a few days left before the trial took place. I quoted her in La Vanguardia so she could explain to me how she lived that traumatic experience. She was accompanied by her partner, a stocky young man, also an urban guard, named Pedro Rodríguez. During the interview, Rosa explained the suffering caused by the leak of her photo while her boyfriend lovingly tucked her in. At one point she burst into tears and he whispered in her ear, “Don’t worry, honey.” We titled the news item Pornovenganza in the Urban Police and the issue even reached the Barcelona municipal plenary session.
Eighteen days after that meeting, Pedro Rodríguez was found burned in the trunk of his own car in the Foix reservoir. That muscular and affectionate man with his girlfriend had been brutally murdered. He was 38 years old and a son of two. A few days later, I received a call from a high command of the Mossos who asked me what relationship I had with Rosa and if she was a friend of mine. I replied that I only met her to do the report and that I had never seen her before. That had been a trial call. Two days later, the Mossos arrested Rosa and her lover, Albert López, as perpetrators of Pedro’s murder.
I baptized the event as a crime of the Urban Guard, since all those involved were agents of the local police of Barcelona. The fact of having met the author and the victim of a murder a few days before it was committed, I recognize that it was one of the most shocking experiences of my life and I turned to find out why. I saw Rosa again in November 2019, this time already in prison where she gave me an interview. Specifically in Brians 1, the center to which she had been transferred after destabilizing the coexistence between the inmates in the Wad-Ras prison. Rosa has a great capacity for persuasion and she speaks with the conviction of someone who believes everything she says, even if it is a lie. She looks directly into her eyes throughout the entire conversation. Her thesis is that Albert had killed Pedro and during the days that followed she did not notify the police because she was afraid of him. In the interview, however, she said something that did not add up. “They say I’m very manipulative, but if I’m so manipulative, how come I never got Albert to come live with me in Cubelles? I have never convinced him.” If he was so afraid of her there was no point in wanting him to live with her.
The sentence concluded that Rosa and Albert killed Pedro because he was an obstacle to being together. The crime was a kind of test of cruel and perverse love. Something like ‘if you love me, show it and kill it’. Rosa drugged Pedro, took him down to a kind of storage room on the ground floor and they both finished him off while he was in a daze. They had one goal: to get rid of everyone who prevented them from becoming a family. The day after the crime, they tried to hang the death on Rosa’s ex-husband, who was claiming joint custody of their daughters, driving Pedro’s mobile to the vicinity of the ex-husband’s house to make the Mossos believe that this was the last place where the deceased had been. Only Rosa knew where her ex-husband lived. When she Rosa felt cornered she betrayed Albert and accused him of the crime. Albert ended up doing the same.
