There are many reasons why the murder of Pedro Rodríguez had Catalan society obsessed even before the production of Crims or the miniseries The Burning Body. The protagonists were members of the Barcelona Urban Police, there were love triangles and agents suspended from service. But, even approaching the case from fiction with Úrsula Corberó and Quim Gutiérrez as Rosa Peral and Albert López, there is a substantial detail about which the Netflix series does not have a clear thesis: Why did Rosa Peral kill Pedro Rodríguez?
From The Body on Fire the following is stated. For a few weeks, Rosa Peral managed to combine three sexual relationships: with Albert, who was her partner in the Urban Police and with whom she had been sleeping for years, with the man who was then her husband (Izak Férriz in fiction) and with Pedro Rodríguez (José Manuel Poga), another member of the Urban Guard with whom he had begun a romantic idyll. Rosa Peral, upon seeing that Pedro offered her stability and was committed to her family, she opted for this relationship.
Things went wrong. Peral was in a revenge porn lawsuit with a superior whom he accused of sending intimate photographs of him to third parties and Rodríguez was suspended from employment and salary for hitting a motorist. The dynamic between the two soon acquired a toxic component (fights, reproaches, jealousy, shouting), which was only increased by the pressure they had put on the relationship, even deciding to get engaged after months of being together.
There are two elements, however, that the script of The Body on Fire does not want to resolve. The first is what exactly happened on the night of May 1, 2017 at Rosa Peral's house and that ended with Pedro Rodríguez being found three days later burned to death in the trunk of his car next to the Foix reservoir. The detective played by Eva Llorach expresses dissatisfaction with not answering all the investigation questions at the end of the series. And the other was the motivation behind the crime. Why did Rosa Peral and Albert López decide to kill Pedro Rodríguez? What was stopping the murderer from simply breaking up with her partner?
An excuse is offered in the series: the murderer preferred to be the widow than carry the burden of having another failed relationship behind her, especially considering that both her partner and her lover were part of the Urban Police. But perhaps it would be convenient to consider a hypothesis about her: what did Pedro have about her that prevented him from cutting her off. The key could be in the same images of The Burning Body and in the events around August 2014 when a mantero died in Montjuïc.
The official version of events is that the deceased fell down an embankment as part of an operation against street vending. Rosa Peral and Albert López, who were working together that day, cornered him, the man attacked Rosa Peral with a knife and finally jumped off a twenty-meter cliff. The problem? The man, who was found unconscious, was wearing handcuffs.
That case, which was archived in 2018 after the death of Pedro Rodríguez, raised doubts among those investigating the death. Could he have been pushed by Albert López, angry at the attack on his partner and lover? The police officers who participated in the device justified that the victim was handcuffed because, after she fell, she made to attack them with the knife that she was carrying in her hand. In The Burning Body, however, shows another version of the events and a clear involvement of Peral in the cover-up of the possible homicide.
The deceased's attack on Rosa Peral is shown and you can see how Albert López puts handcuffs on the man. But, while the agent tries to stop the bleeding from the leg wound, the detainee falls off the cliff without seeing if he was pushed or not. And here comes the good thing. Later, having no witnesses, Albert asks Rosa to lie for him and she declares to the authorities that she saw how and why the victim fell: “He handcuffed him and there I thought “that's it” but the guy started to stir and tried to headbutt Albert and from the impulse he slipped and fell,” says Rosa Peral of the fiction.
The script of The Body on Fire tries not to start from excessive assumptions but does put the pieces on the table to develop the following hypothesis. Is there a possibility that Pedro could have reached the truth through Rosa? Could this be the reason why he couldn't end the relationship normally? As Rosa Peral's ex-husband explains in the Netflix miniseries, "one death on the file is enough for your career to end."
