On Friday 22 November, Netflix releases a new and compelling true crime series, ‘900 Days Without Anabel’, the story of one of the longest kidnappings in Spain. It was 1993, precisely the month of April, when the young Anabel Segura disappeared into thin air while jogging in the quiet neighborhood of Madrid where she lived. From that moment, and for the three years that followed, all of Spain remained in suspense, with the hope that Anabel would suddenly be freed from her captors. The documentary series will retrace this case, thanks also to the unprecedented vision of the negotiations that took place between the police and the kidnappers, and to the hitherto secret recordings. “Listening to the tapes and obtaining statements from sources allowed us not only to debunk the hoaxes circulating around this case, but also to tell it from the inside,” underlines Monica Palomero, journalist specialized in investigations and social reporting, and responsible for the audiovisual project of the docu-series.
‘900 days without Anabel’: the plot of the Netflix docu-series
On April 12, 1993, the young student Anabel Segura was running in her neighborhood of La Moraleja (Alcobendas, Madrid), when a group of kidnappers grabbed her, forcibly loading her onto a white truck. Only three pieces of evidence remained of the kidnapping: the sports clothes on the street, Annabel’s Walkman, and the testimony of the gardener at the Scandinavian school who heard the screams and saw the criminals’ car. The case shocked the whole of Spanish society, and soon ended up in all the media and prime time programmes. Between 1993 and 1995 there were fourteen phone calls between the family and the kidnappers and each time the amount of the ransom increased, but every time, no one showed up at the place appointed to deliver the amount. The entire Spanish community took to the streets several times to loudly ask for the young woman’s release, but the more time passed the more the hopes of finding her alive diminished. The audio recordings of their phone calls to the family were what framed the kidnappers: a team of specialists from the forensic acoustics district of the State Police managed to identify one of the criminals from his voice. On September 28, 1995, the Spanish police managed to arrest Emilio Muñoz in Pantoja in Toledo, Cándido Ortiz in Madrid and Felisa García, wife of the first of them, in Escalona. The three confessed to having killed Anabel a few hours after her kidnapping, also making it known where they had hidden her body. The body was recovered in an abandoned brick factory in Numancia de la Sagra (Toledo). After the trial, the Toledo regional court sentenced the two men to 43 years and six months and Felisa Garcia to two years and four months.
When ‘900 Days Without Anabel’ comes out on Netflix
The docu-series ‘900 Days Without Anabel’ releases on Netflix on Friday 22 November 2024.