From her cell, Rosa Peral, convicted of the murder of her partner and colleague in the Barcelona Urban Guard Pedro Rodríguez, is clear: “The shame is that, to this day, justice does not exist and now I understand what the blindfold… Already in Roman times, when there were battles at the gates of the town, they entertained them with comic works to distract the attention of the population. Now these works are created by some televisions, the sensational programs and those that “They don’t want to confess that they have made a mistake, ruining my life.”
After telling his version of what is known as the ‘Crime of the Urban Police’ in a documentary on Netflix and granting interviews to several television and radio programs, until his communications were limited, Peral offers an intimate reflection in a writing published in the book Condemned stories (Más mala vida) (Alrevés Editorial) a compendium of criminal stories compiled by journalist Carlos Quílez who narrates his own experiences from his more than 30 years of profession along with stories from convicts and former prisoners, such as Peral or the former president of Barça Sandro Rosell, among others less in the media but with a heartbreaking testimony.
“My name is Rosa Peral. Many of you will know me because of the amount of atrocities that have been said about me, although you don’t really know me… The majority have taken for granted what the press and the parties interested in blaming me have said, but it is not, by any means, all true. Before continuing with my writing I want to make one thing clear: I am Innocent! Innocent of hatching any plan with the unpresentable murderer (Albert) of my partner (Pedro). “Innocent of collaborating in that atrocity. Innocent, even, of wishing such a thing, not even to my worst enemy, much less to Pedro, the man who bet on me, just as I bet on him, even though his family was opposed.” This is how Peral’s story begins in which she reviews her sentence and considers herself “a scapegoat for a psychopath and the police, because they did not know how to get out of the tunnel effect that had them blinded by me.”
In this sense, he once again blames his lover, Albert López, for the crime, ensuring that his “plan” has turned out “just as he wanted: either I am his or I am nobody’s.” “I’m fed up with this situation and, I insist: I’m not a murderer! Albert will be out early, he’ll soon be able to go on leave, and I, meanwhile, will continue to grow old alone in prison. The move has turned out well for him. I knew that being in prison I wouldn’t It would belong to no one else. Everything that has happened doesn’t make me think of anything positive. In fact, I don’t think I’ll get out of prison alive. I just want to sleep. I don’t shower or change my clothes. I live without hope, waiting for death. “explains Peral.
Furthermore, he assures that he survives in “a bubble”, in which “Pedro is waiting for me at home”, to prevent him from being harmed by the fulfillment of the 25-year prison sentence, ratified by the Supreme Court. He also attacks the Urban Guard for not recognizing that “it welcomed a psychopath into the force”, in reference to Albert whom he accuses of “mistreatment” and adds that “it is preferable to focus attention on me and on the morbid, that this is not “it tarnishes no reputation more than mine.”
Peral also denies the accusations she has received while in prison of wanting to end her ex-husband’s life: “To justify all that, they have given me superwoman powers, to read minds, to be a femme fatale, to be a bad person, to be a bad person. cold and calculating.” Furthermore, she denounced her attempts to take away her parental rights over her daughters “with whom I shared my day to day life.”
Along with the story of the former Urban Police agent, Carlos Quílez, collaborator of the program ‘And now Sonsoles’, narrates his experience as a chronicler of police and judicial information, a valuable testimony since his “proximity to the criminal, the police, the judge and the victim allows us to construct this disinterested, but extraordinarily revealing, story of the weaknesses of our society” and offers “flashes of reality in these stories starring guys who one day decided to start a path of no return, gun in hand, towards Nowhere”.
Furthermore, he highlights that prisoners and former prisoners have wanted to tell “from sincerity and completely undressed” their perspective “of life, freedom, prison and the extraordinary pain they have caused their victims.” In addition to Peral, there is also the former president of Barça Sandro Rosell who spent two years in preventive detention until he was acquitted, along with others less in the media such as Jesús Contreras (known as the tracksuit robber), Flako (the Robin Hood of Vallecas) or Emmanuel (head of the Mara Salvatrucha), among others. There are also stories in which criminals and police express from “emotion, rawness and viscerality” some of “their most intimate memories” and there is a chapter dedicated to the trial and execution of the anarchist activist Salvador Puig Antich.
In his story, Rosell assures that “I spent almost two years of my life in prison, unjustly, a victim of the corruption of the State sewers, but for this writing this does not matter, or perhaps it does. When they ask me if they changed my feelings when I entered prison, the answer is emphatically yes. What I am not so clear about is whether the change in feelings would have been different if my prison had been fair. For example, the feeling of internal rage that I had every day, thinking that people evil of the system was willing to corrupt itself to put innocent people in jail, taking advantage of the worst crime that can be committed, which is the abuse of power. Surely, and as an example, I would not have developed that feeling if my prison had been just for some certain and conscious crime on my part”.
With more than 30 years of professional experience, Carlos Quílez Lázaro (Barcelona, ??1966) is an expert in information on events and courts who has focused his passion for communicating on telling those stories that usually do not come to light and are often left behind. between shadows
After twenty years at the head of the courts and police section of the SER chain in Barcelona, ??he ended up at the Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia as Director of Analysis and, after his time at this institution, he returned to journalism with Crónica Global, the Sixth TV, Rac 1 and TV3. In 2019 he founded the digital newspaper Eltaquígrafo.com specialized in events journalism. Since 2022, he has coordinated the events section in the Antena3 program ‘And now Sonsoles’. In addition to being a teacher, he has written a dozen ‘true crime’ books, some of which have won awards, such as the Rodolfo Walsh Prize from the Semana Negra in Gijón and the Crims de Tinta Prize for crime novels from the Generalitat of Catalonia.
