The condemned usually take secrets to the grave and, probably, Rosa Peral and Albert López will never reveal the real reasons why they killed Pedro Rodríguez. After months of investigation and a very intense trial that led to a sentence of 25 years for her and 20 for him, the crime known as the Urban Police crime, committed in 2017, still does not answer an essential question: why did they do it?
This doubt is especially projected on Rosa Peral. We can understand that the pang of compulsive jealousy, the “green-eyed monster” that Shakespeare spoke of, explains what led Albert to the criminal plan. But what about Rosa? She could have just left Pedro. She had already done it with other couples. Was taking revenge on her ex-husband, Rubén, worth the risk? What intimate desire was she satisfying by murdering Pedro and, furthermore, doing so while her two daughters were in the adjoining room?
This week, like thousands of viewers, I watched (rather, devoured) the documentary and the series on Netflix. A first conclusion is that both films respond more to the laws of their audiovisual genre than to the truth. Which does not mean, however, that the two products are a real television bomb. Get rid of Feijóo and his failed investiture… Wow, not even Daniel Sancho has been able to compete against a Mata Hari-like Rosa Peral.
Uniforms, sex, blood, boom!
I subscribe to what was read by series critic Alberto Rey, according to which there are three Rosa Perals: the real one, the fictional one, and a third, more fictional than real, that we had built together long before seeing ‘The Burning Body’. Perhaps a good handful of us who have now returned to this crime have dictated our own verdict depending on which of the three Rosas we are left with. A frivolity, yes, but there is morbidity and what morbidity. If the three Rosas share something, it is that she is a woman who was not trustworthy and who could do whatever she wanted with men, without our (moral) rules. Here her sexual promiscuity breaks the classic scheme of morality, where the man is the bad guy who deceives, and she, the hopelessly seduced Doña Inés.
Netflix of course has not helped to reveal the mystery that the documentary and the series activate: what was the motive for the crime. At trial, the prosecutor summed it up in one word: evil. Gratuitous evil. That which in some people can coexist with goodness in such a close way that sometimes it cannot be distinguished. That makes me think, not just in the Asunta case, which is also true, but in that of Estíbaliz Carranza. Do you remember her? The ice cream lady with the face and attitude of an angel who killed two exes, dismembered them and then continued serving ice cream with her usual kindness. Strawberry, yogurt, pistachio, vanilla, sliced, cone ice creams.