• True Crime The Family Secret That Could Have Prevented Pioz's Quadruple Crime

Spain is not a country of serial killers. Since there is record back in the mid-nineteenth century only thirty have been counted as such. Few if compared to other countries. Perhaps that is why the expectation and interest generated by serial killers in Spain often border on the scandalous. This is what happened with Alfredo Galán, with the so-called 'killer of the deck'. "It is the most important case that Spain has had in recent years. There was a real convulsion," say the participants in the docuseries Baraja: the signature of the murderer, Netflix's new true crime about Galán's crimes.

It has been 20 years since this former soldier killed six people and was about to end the lives of three others. An anniversary, which added to the interest and psychosis it generated in society in 2003, has led to a string of docuseries in true crime mode, so fashionable now, in which, although Galán has not wanted to participate, it has managed to shed light on one of the most shocking and complicated cases in Spanish criminal history.

We were sold that he was a murderer without empathizing and we have dug to know who he was

Marga Luis, executive producer

"We were sold that he was a murderer without empathy and we have dug to know who he was," explains Marga Luis, executive producer of the documentary. "There are images recorded by Galán's environment where you have a brutal authenticity of how it really was, how its context was. The testimonies we have give a very different view of him," he says.

If Alfredo Galán had not gotten drunk that July 3, 2003 and had not appeared at the police station in Puertollano (Ciudad Real) to confess to the six murders, probably, the 'murderer of the deck' would be today one of the great criminal unknowns of our country.

Has everything been told about his crimes? Was it really discovered why he did it? Were any pieces of the puzzle left unfitted? Baraja answers these questions: the signature of the murderer. This true crime comes just a few months after the premiere of another, El asesino de la Baraja, on RTVE Play, but unlike this Netflix has unpublished testimonies so far that without opening new lines of investigation do open doubts that until now nobody had raised. Among these testimonies, the one of Galán's lawyer, Helena Echeverri, that of Teresa Sánchez, the only survivor of Galán's crimes in the Bar Rojas or that of the son of Galán's first victim, present at the murder, is especially relevant.

In fact, for Cuarzo Producciones is the unpublished testimony of Teresa Sánchez one of the most important and shed more light on the case. "She gives you a point of view of the investigation that had never been captured," says Luis. "She has had a double or triple ordeal: they killed her son, they wounded her to the brink of death. His testimony confronts us with who we are as a society so that we only remember the 'killer of the deck', "says the producer.

He's not the only one. Listening to the forensic psychiatrist who made Galán's report that was taken to the trial say that he only saw him five hours and that nothing but the surface reached, "is tremendous," says Luis. The documentary does not seek to cast doubt on anything that happened with the 'killer of the deck'. Deck: the signature of the murderer puts the cards on the table and appeals to the viewer to react.

"He went hunting, he went out to kill," insist the investigators of the case, a statement that during the months that the hunt lasted for the 'murderer of the Baraja' filled dozens and dozens of headlines. "It was an extraordinary game journalistically speaking. The press was unleashed," acknowledges journalist F. Javier Barroso, one of the reporters who followed the crimes from the beginning.

The puzzle starts with an ace of cups placed at the feet of the first victim. It was February 5, 2003, a cold, quiet night. At the Plaza del Mar, in the neighborhood of Alameda de Osuna, the night bus N-4 arrives. The driver finds Martín Estacio lying at the stop, a young man who had just left work at the Barajas airport and who was returning home like many other early mornings. In a Madrid where there was an average of one crime every three days, Martin's murder was one of many. But it was that ace of cups that changed everything, that triggered the press.

12 hours after Martin's murder, a new event arrives at the newsrooms: two people had been murdered and another was very serious in the Rojas bar, in Alcalá de Henares. At first, no one linked the crimes, nor was it known until much later that the first murder of Alfredo Galán was not that of Martín, but that of Juan Francisco Ledesma, doorman of number 89 Alonso Cano Street. It was January 24.

It was thanks to ballistics when these crimes and those that would come later in Tres Cantos and Arganda Rey were related: a Tokarev 7'62 would fit the first pieces. In Madrid there was a serial killer, a man who killed for the sake of killing, "in total cold blood," investigators recall.

This is how the image of the murderer was sold, this is how a psychosis that lasted too many months was encouraged. However, the cards that the documentary puts on the table are very different. It is revealed that Alfredo Galán was not a particularly aggressive person, that he was shy, that the tokarev with which he committed his crimes was brought inside a television when he returned from his mission in Bosnia, that, according to the forensic psychiatrist, Juan José Carrasco, who made Galán's report after his arrest, "Alfredo Galán had no symptoms of mental pathology, but of a way of being."

"We were interested in delving into how many times the story we create around serial killers has nothing to do with reality. They compared him to the Washington sniper, to the 'zodiac killer' and when you see him with his underpants, his stained shirt, which did not raise his head even once during the trial, you see a very different person, "recalls the producer.

When he committed the first three murders, he was still visiting the psychiatrist who treated him.

The 'killer of the deck' returned from Bosnia, according to the account of his friends, with the intention of taking a vacation. However, as he returns, he is sent to Galicia to collect chapapote. "It's already out of control there," they explain. In fact, although his first crime was that of Juan Francisco Ledesma, it was not the first warning of alarm. Before that January 24, 2003, he suffers an anxiety crisis after trying to steal the car of an elderly woman. He receives psychiatric treatment, is discharged, asks for voluntary discharge from the Army and continues his treatment at the Gómez Ulla.

When he committed the first three murders, he was still visiting the psychiatrist who was treating him. However, in the first list that the investigators requested from the Army about soldiers in his age group in psychiatric treatment, Alfredo Galán was not. The main investigators of the case, who in the documentary assure that although he had not surrendered they would have reached him because they were already on the track, discover during the filming of the docuseries that Galán was not in those records, which would have made it almost impossible to have reached him.

It is not the only discovery. Thanks to the testimonies of Teresa Sánchez, Ledesma's son, those of Anahid's lawyer, the survivor of the crime in Tres Cantos, and those of Galán's lawyer and journalists who always doubted that the 'murderer of the deck' was only one, the documentary puts on the table a new possibility: "Was Alfredo Galán a scapegoat?"

On March 10, 2005, almost two years after he surrendered in Puerto Llano, Alfredo Galán was sentenced to 142 years in prison for six murders resulting in death and three more attempted. The evidence: his confession, which he retracted after 24 hours, some recognition wheels that in the documentary are questioned and a complete semi-percussive cartridge of a Tokarev 7'62 found in his house that coincided with those found in the crimes. The gun never appeared.

On the other hand, the indications of the investigation that the documentary exposes: portraits that did not fit -there were two completely different-, the appearance of the cards of the deck in some corpses yes and in others no, the line of investigation that led to the arrest of a neo-Nazi ultra-rightist who was also in Bosnia, a recognition wheel, that of Anahid, "flawed", another in which Teresa Sánchez recognized that first detainee and that was not carried out correctly ... And the change of the version of Galán himself in the trial.

It is in the first session of the trial where everything changes. It is Galán's own lawyer who tells how she and her client had agreed on a statement and the 'killer of the deck' decided to modify it. A version to which his lawyer still today gives "all the credibility". Galán declares in court that he is innocent, that he did not kill anyone, but that he knows who did it, that it was to them that he sold the Tokarev that he brought from Bosnia and that he blamed himself because the murderers threatened to harm his sisters. The 'killer of the deck' asks the court for protection to reveal who they were. He does not get to make a complete account and did not continue with that line of investigation.

The investigators are clear that no, that it was him, that everything pointed to him, that the evidence found was sufficient, that only he in his first statement to the Police knew that the letters he left before the bodies of his victims were marked with a dot written in pen on the back, which in the records gave details of the clothes he wore in the crimes. However, both Anahid, Ledesma's daughter, and Galán's lawyer continue to doubt that he acted alone. "His statement about my father's death doesn't fit. I doubt my father was submissive as he said. In addition, he had blows to his hands, eyes... It was a scripted trial," he says.

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