Haughtiness and disorderly desire to be preferred to others.
Pride is the first of the seven deadly sins and appears in the story of Alfredo Galán Sotillo, known as the killer of the fight and sentenced to 142 years in prison for six murders and three more in the degree of attempt.
The man, who was 25 years old, became in 2003 one of the most ruthless serial killers in criminal history. He killed without pattern, without method, without logic. He killed, as he himself confessed, to “experience” what it felt like to kill and when he saw that he did not feel anything extraordinary and that it was easy, he continued to do it without fear of being arrested and plunged society into a climate unbearable with anguish and terror.
In those days, anyone could be the target of the fight killer. There were no social networks, but there were television programs with panels of experts who tried to decipher the motivations of a criminal who randomly left on the corpse of his victims successive cards from the deck.
Alfredo Galán, the fourth of five brothers in a working-class family from Puertollano, who became sad at the age of eight when his mother died giving birth to his sister, never stood out in anything. He enlisted in the army and as a professional was assigned to two missions in Bosnia, where he bought for 400 pesetas the Tokarev and the 7.65 by 25 millimeter ammunition that he used in all his crimes.
The first was on January 24, 2003 at half past twelve in the morning in the Chamberí district of Madrid. He left his house in his gray Renault Mégane ready to kill for the first time. He parked and started walking, waiting for the best moment. He followed closely a briefcase that gave him no choice and that’s when he passed through an open portal that communicated with the porter’s apartment, which he accessed until the living room. Juan Francisco Ledesma was wearing the blue frog from work and was at the table finishing lunch with his two-year-old son, who was drinking a glass of milk. Without saying anything, he took the gun out of the right pocket of his tracksuit jacket and aimed it at the man’s forehead.
“On your knees and facing the wall”, he told her. Without uttering a word, the porter obeyed, while the little one watched. “I put the gun four centimeters from his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet didn’t go out. I had to reassemble the weapon”, declared Galán. The victim begged: “Please don’t kill me.” But he shot. The victim was stunned and the child began to cry. He did not touch the wallet with money on the table. He got in the car, went back to his house, ate something and took a nap. He chose the victim at random.
The homicide was investigated as another death; the police could not find a mobile phone and were surprised by the use of a Tokarev, a military weapon from the Second World War in the Balkans but not common among criminals in Spain.
Eleven days later, Galán committed his second homicide. On February 5, he stayed at home until one in the morning, when “I went out into the street to kill again”. He decided on the northern area of ??Madrid, Barajas, and it wasn’t until half past four that he saw the first person, a man sitting at a bus stop in the Alameda de Osuna neighborhood. He stopped the car in front of the carport and left the engine running. “On your knees and against the tree,” he ordered as he pointed. Juan Carlos Martín, a 28-year-old airport cleaner, obeyed. Galán put the gun to the back of his head and fired. He picked up the pod and dropped an ace of hearts at the victim’s feet. “Why did you leave the letter?”, a policeman told him later. “To make things difficult for you”.
That same day, at four in the afternoon, after eating and watching television, he returned to the street “to continue killing”. He decided on Alcalá de Henares. In an alley on Carrer Alberche he found the Rojas bar open. He entered holding the weapon. He shot the owner’s 18-year-old son, Mikel Jiménez, in the forehead, and a 57-year-old widowed neighbor, Juana Dolores Uclés, who had come downstairs to make a phone call. The owner of the place, Teresa Sánchez García, 38 years old, took refuge behind the bar and Galán shot her “in the eye” three times, which caused her physical and psychological injuries for life. He then explained that that time he did not leave any letter “to mislead the police”.
A month later, in the town of Tres Cantos, the young Santiago Eduardo Salas and Anahid Castillo were saying goodbye at three in the morning at the gate of her house. Without saying anything, he walked towards them, who thought he wanted to ask them for fire. Galán aimed at the man’s forehead, but the bullet deflected into his face. He forced her to kneel and when he fired, the gun jammed again. He didn’t risk it. He ran out, but before he threw the card of the two of glasses thinking that the young man had died, although he saved his life and spent years from operating room to operating room. The victim declared at the trial: “I will never forget that face, it still terrifies me.”
On March 18, Galán left his house a little before nine o’clock at night, wanting to kill. In the media, in the bars, practically only the killer of the fight was talked about and the inability of the investigators to arrest him. At random, he chose the town of Arganda del Rey. He followed a man in a field, who got lost behind some hedges, but it didn’t take him long to run into a couple, Gheorghe and his wife Doina, both Romanians. They were walking confidently with their backs to Galán when he took out his gun and shot the man first, directly in the head. Then against the woman, who was shot four times. On their bodies he threw the cards 3 and 4 of cups.
By then, the National Police and Civil Guard no longer had any doubt that they were dealing with a serial killer who killed at random. They made three robot portraits based on the story of two of the survivors and asked the FBI for help. The Ministry of Defense added Galán to a list of suspects for a couple of incidents in the army and the psychiatric discharge after which he abandoned his military career. But investigators showed his photograph to the survivors, and since they didn’t recognize him, they dismissed him.
On May 22, 2003, the National Police arrested another of the suspects who appeared on the army’s list. He was a nightclub doorman, linked to the extreme right and with a history. The two survivors recognized him, but he was soon released when it was seen that he had an alibi for the crimes. The pressure was unbearable.
On July 3, 2003, after three months without killing and tired of not being found, Galán presented himself drunk at the municipal police station in his town, Puertollano, asserting that he was the murderer of the fight. As they did not believe him, he said to them: “The cards on the side of the dead have on the back a blue dot of marker marked in the center; call your homicide colleagues”.
Alfredo Galán remains in Herrera de la Mancha prison, in Ciudad Real. Survivor Anahid Castillo died of cancer in Ecuador. Before he died he asked his mother to visit Galán in prison to tell him that she had forgiven him. It couldn’t be. He refused to receive it.
