The 2017 Murder Of Spanish Cop Pedro Rodrìguez And What Happened After
When the remains of Pedro Rodríguez were first discovered in the trunk of a torched car near the Foix reservoir an hour's drive from the center of the Catalonian capital Barcelona, his identity was impossible to verify, the blaze having degraded his body beyond recognition. According to El Pais, it was only through the discovery of a prosthetic among the charred bones with later allowed investigators to make a positive I.D. of the victim: a local police officer who was almost certainly murdered.
The murder of a police officer is highly unusual in most countries: when it happens, news reports often describe the attacks as acts of revenge committed by criminals and their associates who have been brought to justice. But as the world received more details of the Rodríguez case, it became apparent that the story of the police officer's killing was in many ways stranger than fiction. Rodríguez, it turned out, had been murdered in the fallout of a vicious love triangle, but what made the scenario particularly shocking was that Rodríguez's alleged murderers were members of the police force too. In the months that followed the discovery of Rodríguez's body and the subsequent arrest of those involved in his death, Spain became transfixed by an unbelievable story that led to two enormous prison sentences and one of the country's most shocking crimes in recent memory.
A love triangle uncovered
The pair soon accused of the murder of Pedro Rodríguez were Albert López and Rosa Peral, colleagues of the deceased man in Barcelona's Guàrdia Urbana police force. In fiction, the dynamics of a murderous love triangle typically see a person conducting an affair with a new lover, and conspiring with them to kill their former partner. But the murder of Pedro Rodríguez was slightly more complicated.
According to The Telegraph, Albert López and Rosa Peral were shift buddies in the police force, who first started having an affair in 2012 while she was married to another man. Peral's relationship with Rodríguez came years later, and though the two eventually moved in together, she continued to have an on-off affair with López. López eventually confronted Rodríguez and came clean about his liaisons with Peral, leading to turbulence between all three. Somewhere along the line, however, López and Peral reconciled and decided to take Rodríguez out of the picture.
The conviction of López and Peral
The murder of Pedro Rodríguez happened in the middle of the night, at the home he shared with Rosa Peral, after her lover Albert López arrived at the house. Despite prosecutors presenting the jury with Pedro Rodríguez's exact movements on the night he died and the presence of the two alleged killers which meant that they were certainly involved in his death, they were unable to uncover the precise details of who committed the slaying while the victim slept soundly. Nevertheless, the scenario that was laid out confirmed that the pair were involved in the murder with malice aforethought and that later they drove Rodríguez's car along with his cell phone to various nearby locations in an effort to create a false narrative that would throw off investigators. They even drove to the home of Peral's ex-husband and concocted a story in which the two had been involved in a feud in an attempt to draw the innocent party into the police investigation.
The two were photographed at a dinner party shortly after the murder, with Peral playfully sticking her tongue out at the camera. At trial, however, the two turned on each other, each claiming the other was the murderer. In July 2020, Peral was sentenced to 25 years in prison for her part in Rodríguez's death, while López was sentenced to 20 years. Since then, the story has become fodder for the true crime genre, with a documentary series about the murder, "Rosa Peral's Tapes," featuring exclusive interviews with the convicted murderer from prison, coming to Netflix in September 2023.