Triplet of aces: Rosa Peral, Daniel Sancho and Josu Ternera. The sick center of our lives. Murderers – confessed, suspected or sentenced – always arouse curiosity. And not all morbid or unhealthy. Trying to understand, looking for the whys, is part of our nature.
Emmanuel Carrère became a European saint of letters thanks to L’adversari (2000), the work that dives into the ego of the psychopathic narcissist Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who pretended to be a doctor for 18 years. Discovering the lie, he murdered his wife, children and parents. A similar experiment, which inspired Carrère, had already been practiced by Truman Capote in 1966 in In Cold Blood.
Wickedness fascinates. It provides readers and viewers. Also money. The Manson Family is not registered as a trademark, but it could be. Your product? Nine homicides between July and August 1969 in Los Angeles.
Evil, real or fictitious, banal or profound, can come with embellishments so that we receive it as a false gift. Four years ago, Joker's murders were celebrated with collective applause in cinemas. But there are examples that have not come out of a film script. The idolatry that even today arouses the depraved criminal Marquis de Sade would be a good example.
Every killer who rises to fame is inevitably accompanied by a narrative. And it is this that ends up fixing in our individual and collective imagination the severity with which we judge, beyond the Criminal Code and the sentences, butchers. No criminal is a stranger to this game of mirrors.
It helps Daniel Sancho to be clean and the son of a native actor so that we are presented with a murder and a dismemberment almost like an excessive hooliganism of a spoiled teenager. That the doctor was Colombian and that the crime was committed on the other side of the world makes our media more lenient. They can focus attention on secondary elements of the plot without being embarrassed. If the surgeon was from Eixample and the crime had been committed in Les Corts, Sancho would be presented as the worst of monsters.
With Rosa Peral, a convicted murderer, we are now witnessing, with the excuse of the premiere of two television productions, the attempt to dress her with a new narrative: hers. From the femme fatale sentenced for murder to the woman unjustly imprisoned by a patriarchal system, which punished her without evidence to make her pay for the multiple sexual relationships she had had. We will see her on the sets one day and the judicial truth will be the least. If we've degraded enough by then it might even occur to someone that they could stand for election to try and profit from their ability to lie without batting an eyebrow.
And Joshua Veal? In the spotlight for the premiere of the documentary No me llame Ternera by Jordi Èvole and Màrius Sánchez. A severe interrogation of a criminal that, far from what has been claimed, does not lead to whitewashing the figure of the étarra and much less to the rewriting of his biography. Rather the opposite. The controversy has actually been nothing more than an attempt to judge Évole for condemning him without reason as a friend of terrorists. It is the only one of the three cases presented that is journalistically exemplary.
If the evil is to be explained to us as necessary as it is inevitable, it is better that the dish is served in Évole's style. Without underestimating the intelligence of the viewer. More Veal and less Peral and Sancho.
