The dead that don’t exist.
No confession, no witnesses, no dead bodies, no biological remains, yet a conviction. This is the real case of Ramon Laso, a Spanish serial killer convicted in 1993 for the murders of his first wife and six-year-old son, and in 2014 for the murders of his second wife and brother-in-law.
Laso’s wife was found decapitated by a train at a station in Amposta, Catalonia (Spain). The death was declared a suicide despite the victim’s family’s suspicions about Laso. Nine months later, Laso’s car fell off a 20-meter cliff with his six-year-old son inside, from which Laso apparently escaped unharmed. Laso offered multiple versions of the events to law enforcement and, although he eventually admitted to staging both “accidents” he never confessed to murder. He was convicted at trial and sentenced to 56 years in prison for both murders in 1993. He was granted parole in 1999, citing good behavior during his incarceration.
After his release, Laso married Julia Lamas, a janitor who knew nothing of his criminal past.
Laso also had affairs with other women, including Mercedes Lamas (his sister-in-law), who was married to Maurici Font, a man whom Laso had met in the garden they both tended. Laso picked up his wife Julia at her place of work after meeting Maurici that day. Neither Font nor Julia Lamas were ever seen again. Laso told Mercedes that his wife Julia and Font were having an affair and that they ran away together, but the story raised Mercedes’ suspicions, and she reported him to the police.
The police searched extensively in the garden, in Ramon’s bar (in which had dug a hole in the basement after the disappearances), and in the Amposta cemetery, where Juan had worked as an undertaker and where his first family had been buried. Still, the bodies were never found.
In 2010, after the disappearances, but just before his arrest, Laso attempted to start a relationship with a neighbor. When the neighbor refused, Laso snuck into her basement and left a rose taped to a dead bird. The next day, the woman was involved in a car accident and was informed that someone had tampered with the brakes.
With a quadruple homicide and an attempted murder under his belt, Ramon still claimed his innocence. However, he was ultimately sentenced to 30 years in prison, even though no bodies or biological remains were ever found. There weren’t any witnesses either, nor was there even a murder weapon, but Spain’s Supreme Court confirmed his sentence in 2016. This begs the question: Is it true that without a body there is no crime?
Keen investigators, a witness who contradicts his own testimony, a puzzle of circumstantial evidence and one suspect, Ramón Laso, whose concerning criminal record will not go unnoticed by the investigators of the Central Unit of Missing Persons.
RELEVANT DATA: Following years of interviews with Ramón Laso from his penitentiary center, journalist and criminologist Fàtima Llambrich has drawn a vivid portrait of a disturbingly seductive man. A pioneering case in Spain for the first 30-year prison sentence for homicide without the bodies of the victims having been found. The journalist portrays the mediatized case, combining an account of documented facts with interviews of the protagonists.
Fàtima Llambrich has worked for more than 15 years in the Catalan television channel TV3, covering the current events related to police investigations, judicial processes or facts about security.
What the critics have said:
“Fatima turns you into an investigator. The way she narrates the facts makes you immerse yourself in the plot, I would even say, directly in the mind of the protagonist, in his way of thinking. […] Being able to create your own hypothesis about who and, especially, what Ramon Laso was like.” El taquígrafo (digital magazine)
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Movie, Docudrama, Documental.
LANGUAGES AVAILABLE: Spanish.
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