Jose Pardeiro was driving when he received the phone call. It was a friend. He warned him that “something” had happened, with a strangled voice. He stopped on the roadside. “Rafa is not Rafa,” he told him. Rafa, his friend for almost 10 years. Patricia’s husband, his childhood friend, with whom he had dinner or went to the movies almost every week. Rafa, the national police officer. Rafa’s real name was Rafael, but that was where the truth ended. Everything else was a lie.
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The name of Jose’s friend, too. Patricia does not want to be identified, because when the house of cards collapses and the defrauded becomes that, the shock comes with a life sentence. One that comes with question marks: “But how didn’t you realize it?”. In her case, two: “Did you never see your husband’s police uniform?”. “Let’s see how you explain that you lived a lie for 10 years and that they don’t think you’re an idiot,” she says.
Alongside her, the 22 pages of the first complaint she filed when she “discovered the scheme,” in which, with Jose, her friend and since then lawyer, they tried to compile a decade of elaborate lies, debts, and forgeries. He left her without cards, without money, and drowning in debt; with a fake police badge that ―then she knew― she had never stopped to scrutinize. Married to a man who was not who he said he was and whom she could not report because within marriage there is no crime of fraud, according to article 268 of the Penal Code.
From Ubrique to Pozuelo
They met on a dating app in 2010; he said he lived in Cádiz and was from Ubrique. Rafa was 27 and Patricia, 29. The relationship was quick; a few months later he wanted to move to Madrid with her, he had an opportunity to change police stations. It was now or never, an urgency that — like so many things — made sense later. He said he had started working at the Pozuelo de Alarcón police station, in the Drugs and Organized Crime Unit (Udyco), and that’s why he didn’t wear a uniform. He talked about his coworkers, sent her photos that looked like police premises. She met his family and friends from Ubrique, and he also told them anecdotes about his police routine.
In the joint account they opened, every month there was a deposit with the concept “Ministry of the Interior payroll.” There lies the first thing that tortures Patricia: “We put the same password on the bank account for both of us, the one you need to make any transaction.” When shortly after she started having trouble accessing it, he sent her screenshots of supposed conversations with the bank confirming everything was in order and it was just an error. The balance was intact. He took over the finances, he always had more time; his friends also became Rafa’s friends. They married in 2014. The talk was that the bride’s group was much larger than the groom’s, barely four friends of his, none police officers. “He said he wanted to separate work and personal life because he had many people under his charge,” she recalls.
Already as a married couple, Patricia opened a hair salon with a partner and Rafa took care of the accounting. On the surface, everything seemed to be going well, but something started to creak, at first like an occasional murmur: cash disappearing, claims for overdue rent… When she confronted him, Rafa turned the situation around and ended up crying: it was because of a “crazy” ex-girlfriend; he hadn’t told her to avoid worrying her.
They bought a car for Patricia’s parents, which he said he was paying them month by month. By chance, she discovered in her mother’s notebook that they had hardly been paid anything. Another mistake, he said. He had written it down wrong. Rafa solved it by talking to his mother-in-law and sending Patricia a screenshot of the WhatsApp conversation. By then Rafa had already changed to a phone that allowed him to have a dual SIM card to be able to forge that and hundreds of other conversations for years. “He sent me the screenshots, but never let me see them on his phone,” she says. Again, the owner of the salon premises demanded months of unpaid rent. Same resolution: he took care of it, screenshot, and she never heard from it again.
There are dozens of stories, of pebbles that Patricia collected before realizing that the path led to a precipice, not a stony path. The truth never appears abruptly. One day Rafa showed up with a car identical to hers, but without the Route 66 sticker on the trunk. When she cornered him because the license plates didn’t match, he claimed a bizarre trade with the dealership. Not until much later, at the trial, did she learn that he had forged her signature and her mother’s to sell it and keep the money. “A liar strives to be believable: since what he told wasn’t, it had to be true,” says Emmanuel Carrère in The Adversary, the chronicle about the murderer Jean-Claude Romand, who also led a double life for decades.
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“At the time I thought he was irresponsible and a coward, who on top of that gaslighted me to convince me it was my fault,” Patricia admits. They even went to couples therapy to address her “lack of trust,” as she had more and more stones in her pockets. He monopolized the sessions. Until the psychologist asked Patricia for an individual session and everything changed: “I went there convinced I was crazy, for her to help me because we were no longer okay, and when I told her everything she told me I had to discover what was happening, that I had gotten used to living in fear.”
The group ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’
The discretion of her surroundings was an unwitting accomplice to many of the fictions. Years passed and they saw more and more things about Rafa that didn’t add up, but they were loose pieces and they didn’t want to interfere. Until the summer of 2019. A friend of Patricia’s, a municipal police officer with a suspicion, told her bluntly: at the police station Rafa said he had transferred to, there was no Udyco unit. Another friend, a civil servant, checked that there was no Rafael V. M. in any public registry. Patricia looked for the capture of the BOE she had sent years before, where his appointment as National Police appeared. She looked at it again and saw the complete puzzle: it was fake. “I think Rafa is not a police officer,” she told her father-in-law. “I haven’t known who my son is for a long time,” he replied.
Rafa did not show up when everything exploded. He fled to Ubrique. Jose, from the roadside where he received the news, called him. “I didn’t recognize the person who answered. He had a Cádiz accent I had never heard in nine years,” he says. He felt as if his best friend had died, but the priority was Patricia. Along with Delia Rodríguez, his law partner, he started the legal strategy to catch him. Changing locks, filing for divorce, getting rid of his things. And in that process, the cards started falling. Patricia had no idea how high the castle was: he had removed her from the bank accounts, indebted her with loans in her name, even her hair salon was hanging by a thread. She never found out about the claims because he had blocked from her phone the numbers of landlords, acquaintances, and anyone who could reveal that Rafa was not Rafa. He didn’t work at any police station, for almost a decade he hooked up sporadic telemarketing contracts. He geolocated Patricia’s phone so he wouldn’t get caught when he pretended to go to work. He forged payslips, signatures, photos, tax returns, and even court orders. His life. And hers.
The real police arrested him in Ubrique on May 19, 2021, for fraud, document forgery, and embezzlement. Delia and Jose racked their brains to build the case because most of the embezzlements were committed while they were married. “If there is no abuse or violence, there is no criminal liability between spouses for property crimes such as fraud. So we claim the amount defrauded through civil proceedings,” explains Delia. In total, they were able to gather evidence to claim just over 27,000 euros, but the total is higher. The bulky case file confirms it, as does the WhatsApp group history their friends set up to collect evidence. They named it “Sleeping with the Enemy” and the castle kept growing there. They discovered that Rafa had also stolen money from many of them, charging small amounts like electricity bills to their cards.
When one of them ran into Rafa on the street, he didn’t confront him. He approached the woman he was kissing and briefly told her who Rafa was. What he had done. She was initially stunned but then contacted Patricia. Her new partner had also seen things that didn’t add up and that helped her stop in time. From the group, they have coordinated to do the same with all the partners the fake police officer has had since he defrauded Patricia. They all already had some pebbles, but they didn’t distrust enough.
Patricia didn’t see Rafa again until 2022, in the Ubrique court. Before the trial, he accepted the agreement to pay her back what he had defrauded. The money, of course. The rest she has already taken care of herself, therapy, and her friends. And even so, when someone shows up at the salon and asks for “Rafa’s wife,” Patricia shivers. For years there was a trickle of people claiming money from her ex-husband. It’s been a long time since then, but there are also months when he doesn’t pay her what he committed to return. He never answered Patricia’s questions nor those of this newspaper. “I was terrified to find out that my life was a fucking lie,” she now admits. From one of the transparent sleeves of the dossier of her story, something slips out. A police badge. “I didn’t know where it was!”, she celebrates. She decides to keep it as a souvenir “of cops and crooks.” It’s fake, and it doesn’t even seem real anymore.
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