Ten years married to an impostor: her husband was not a policeman and emptied her bank accounts
Patricia lived a decade with a man who pretended to be a national police officer while financially fleecing her. El País reconstructs the case.
The husband who never existed: a decade of deception, debts and double life
Jose Pardeiro was at the wheel when his telephone rang. It was a friend. He warned him that something had happened, his voice tense. He pulled the car over onto the hard shoulder. "Rafa is not Rafa," they told him. Rafa, his friend of nearly ten years. The husband of Patricia, his childhood friend, with whom he would dine or go to the cinema almost every week. The national police officer. Rafa was indeed called Rafael, but there the truth ended.
According to El País, Patricia—a fictitious name she requested to avoid identification—fears that once the house of cards has collapsed, the label of victim of fraud will carry its own stigma: a perpetual chain of questions. "How did you not notice?" "Did you never see your husband's police uniform?" "Let's see how you explain that you've lived ten years in a lie and that they don't think you're an idiot," she says.
With her, the 22 pages of the first complaint she filed when she "discovered the truth". With Jose, her friend and lawyer since then, she tried to compile a decade of elaborate lies, debts and falsifications. Rafa left her without cards, without money and burdened with debts. Also with a fake police badge that—she then realised—she had never bothered to examine. Married to a man who was not who he said he was, and whom she could not report: within marriage fraud is not a crime, according to article 268 of the Criminal Code.
A relationship built on lies from the very first day
They met on a dating application in 2010. He said he lived in Cádiz and was from Ubrique. Rafa was 27 years old; Patricia was 29. The relationship moved forward quickly: a few months later he wanted to move to Madrid with her, citing an opportunity to transfer to a different police station. Manufactured urgency that, like so many other things, made sense much later. He said he had started working at the Pozuelo de Alarcón police station, in the Drug and Organised Crime Unit (Udyco), which was why he did not wear a uniform. He talked about his colleagues, sent photos that appeared to be from police facilities. He met Patricia's family and friends from Ubrique, and he also told them anecdotes about his police routine.
In the joint bank account they opened, every month a deposit arrived with the concept "Ministry of Interior salary". That was the first point that torments Patricia today: "We put the same PIN on the account for both of us, the one you need to make any transaction". When she began to have access problems, he would send her screenshots of supposed conversations with the bank confirming that everything was in order and that it was simply an error. He then took charge of the couple's finances: he always had more free time. His friends also became theirs. They married in 2014. The talk was that the bride's group was much larger than the groom's, barely four people, none of them police officers. "He said he wanted to keep work and his personal life separate, because he had a lot of people under him," Patricia recalls.
Hairdressing, accounts and the first crack
As a married couple, Patricia set up a hairdressing salon with a partner and Rafa took charge of the business accounts. On the surface everything seemed fine, but warning signs began to emerge: cash that disappeared, claims for unpaid rent. When she confronted him, he would turn the situation against her and end up crying: the blame was an ex-girlfriend who was "crazy"; he had not told her to avoid worrying her.
They bought a car for Patricia's parents, which he promised to pay for month by month. By chance, she found in her mother's notebook that they had received practically nothing. Another mistake, said Rafa. He had written it down wrong. He resolved the situation by speaking to his mother-in-law and sending Patricia a screenshot of the conversation via WhatsApp. By then he had already switched to a phone with a dual SIM card, which allowed him to forge that and hundreds more conversations over years. "He would send me the screenshots, but he never let me see them on his phone," she says. The owner of the hairdressing premises also claimed months of unpaid rent. Same formula: he would handle it, a screenshot would arrive, and the matter would disappear.
The pieces that did not fit together
There are dozens of episodes that Patricia accumulated without understanding that the path led to a precipice. One day Rafa appeared with a car identical to hers, but without the Route 66 sticker on the boot. When she cornered him because the registration plates did not match, he invented a convoluted car trade-in with the dealer. Only much later, in court, did she learn that he had forged her signature and her mother's to sell it and pocket the money.
"A liar makes an effort to be plausible: because what he said was not plausible, it must be true," writes Emmanuel Carrère in The Enemy, the chronicle about Jean-Claude Romand, who also maintained a double life for decades.
"At the time I thought he was irresponsible and a coward, and on top of that he was gaslighting me to convince me it was my fault," Patricia admits. They even went to couples therapy to address her "lack of trust". He monopolised the sessions. It was the psychologist who asked for an individual session with Patricia and changed course: "I went convinced I was mad, and when I told her everything she told me I had to discover what was happening, that I had become accustomed to living in fear".
The circle that remained silent and the final collapse
The circle of friends was an involuntary accomplice to much of the fiction. Over the years they saw things about Rafa that did not add up, but they were loose pieces and no one wanted to pry. Until the summer of 2019, when a friend of Patricia's, a municipal police officer who had long harboured suspicions, said it bluntly: at the police station to which Rafa claimed to have transferred, there was no Udyco unit.
That was when Jose received that telephone call at the wheel. And when Patricia began to name ten years of lies, debts and systematic manipulation alongside a man who was never who he said he was.
Source: El País