Series Review: "The Playing Card Killer" ("Baraja: La Firma Del Asesino") (2023).

From the director of Last Street and Entre Vinyes comes The Playing Card Killer (Baraja: La Firma Del Asesino). This Spanish crime documentary film directed by Amanda Sans Pantling. Playing cards left at crime scenes connect a string of slayings perpetrated by a serial killer known as "Asesino de la Baraja". In the present, the killer contemplates his past crimes in jail.

From January 4 - March 18, 2003, Spanish serial killer, Alfredo Galán Sotillo, killed six people and wounded three. He grew up unremarkable and introverted. In September 1998, he joined the Spanish Army and became a corporal in the 31st Mech Regiment "Asturias" of Madrid and participated in humanitarian missions in Bosnia. He was diagnosed with neurosis and anxiety and continued drinking. On January 24, 2003, Galán shot fifty-year-old Juan Francisco Ledesma in the head in front of his two-year-old son. On February 5, the body of twenty-eight-year-old airport cleaner Juan Carlos Martín Estacio was found shot in the head. An ace of cups was left nearby. Later the same day, Galán entered Bar Rojas in Alcalá de Henares and shot three people: the bar owner, thirty-eight-year-old Teresa Sánchez García survived multiple gunshots; her eighteen-year-old son Mikel Jiménez Sánchez and fifty-seven-year-old customer Juana Dolores Ucles López were killed. On March 7, 2003, twenty-seven-year-old Santiago Eduardo Salas was shot in the face by Galán, but survived. Salas's friend, twenty-nine-year-old Anahid Castillo Ruperti, was able to escape unharmed. A two of cups was dropped at the scene. On the evening of March 18, 2003, Galán shot and killed a husband and wife, Gheorgi and Diona Magda, as they walked home from work. Galán left two more tarot cards — the three and four of cups — at the scene. It was not originally his intention for playing cards to be his "signature". He only began leaving cards after the media sensationalized the fact that a card had been found by a victim's body. On July 3, 2003, while severely inebriated, Galán surrendered at a police station and confessed to being "The Playing Card Killer." His confession included details about pen markings on the cards that were not public. Upon sobering up, he recanted, but ballistics irrefutably linked spent cartridges in his residence to the murders. The weapon was later found at his father’s home. It was reported that in some of the murders, Galán had wished his victims good morning and ordered them to kneel before shooting them. He had smuggled the gun, a Tokarev 7.62-caliber TT-33, into Spain by hiding it in a television set. He will be released in 2028 after twenty-five years in prison.

An absorbing documentary that follows the capture of Spain's most famous serial killer while exposing the flaws of the country's legal and judicial systems. Within a genre that tends to thrive in sensationalism, the series is a rigorous documentary that is especially respectful of the victims and their relatives. A zesty doc that walks right up to the edge of dark thriller, peers over the cliff, and takes a psychological plunge into something weird and fascinating.

Simon Says The Playing Card Killer (Baraja: La Firma Del Asesino) receives: