César Román Viruete was the King of Cachopo, and depending on who he spoke to, he was also a soldier, a civil guard, or an expert in something. But none of this was real, nor was the version that he maintained for years about the crime of his girlfriend for which he was convicted.
The docuseries that Netflix is ????now releasing wants to ”remove the feathers of a peacock” to highlight a victim of sexist violence.
El Rey del Cachopo, a three-chapter miniseries about one of the most high-profile cases in recent years, premieres this Friday on Netflix directed by Román Parrado (El assassin de la baraja, Salvados) and produced by Charlie Arnaiz and Alberto Ortega de Dada Films
It comes to light a few weeks after, in a twist of script, César Román confessed to Heidi Paz’s crime for the first time, after years of denying it. He did so in a letter sent to the Provincial Court of Madrid in which he also assures that she regrets it and asks for forgiveness from the victim’s family.
The series, which had already been recorded, includes this confession at the end. It shows numerous real images of Román, from his childhood to his statements from prison, the entire police investigation and the trial in 2021.
The series has testimonies from police officers who participated in the investigation, the prosecutor in the case, all the lawyers that Román has had since his arrest in 2018, the lawyer for Heidi’s family, his and her friends, and above all a long testimony from Heidi’s mother, Gloria Francis Bulnes, about how she knew that Román had killed her in August 2018, after several months of dating.
Contrary to what happened to director Román Parrado when he made the series about the murderer of La Baraja, in which he recounted the crimes committed by Alfredo Galán, on this occasion he did face ”a very powerful character” with ‘ ‘an ego raised to maximum power”.
He knew that he was facing a fabulist and ”snake charmer” who makes all the attention focus on him. ”The documentary series tries to put the peacock in the middle of the stage, see how shiny all its feathers are and suddenly take them all off so that you are left with the naked truth of what this case was, which is that it killed a poor woman. girl who had a first and last name,” Parrado explained to EFE.
It is a true crime in which the aim is to expose a case of sexist violence, emphasizing the murderer’s ability to manipulate and lie and the humiliation to which he subjected the victim, humiliating her memory.
If in many cases of sexist violence the victim is made invisible, in the case of Heidi Paz’s crime “it is elevated to the nth degree” by the figure of César, says the director.
More than 60 video calls with César Román from prison over three months have allowed the King of Cachopo to tell the same exculpatory version that he maintained at the trial, after which he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the homicide and dismemberment of the young Honduran woman who had told him that she wanted to leave him.
Seeing the character they were facing, who they understand agreed to participate in the docuseries ”to wash his image,” the creators decided that each time they would call Román a person on the team so as not to create ties.
And they always made it clear to him that they were going to come out with their version, even if it was the same one he gave at the trial and led to his conviction, but that they would contrast it.
Thus they did “a lot of ‘fact checking’ and they refuted his statements with police data, something that he sometimes refuted in turn. Other times he hung up the phone on them.
Heidi’s mother, Gloria Francis Bulnes, went to Honduras once the Justice Department returned her daughter’s remains to her, already in 2023, but she agreed to participate in the documentary to, for the first time, give an extensive and calm version of what happened. that lived.
Getting this version has been the greatest effort for the director, who negotiated for months with the family to convince them, since he considered this testimony essential “to give importance to the victim” and counteract Román’s version.
”Having Gloria is Heidi, because she is a strong and feisty woman… and César killed Heidi because she had them in place,” Parrado assures EFE.
The El Rey del Cachopo team hopes to have met its challenge in three chapters full of real images and testimonies sprinkled with dramatized images.
