On July 3, 2003, a drunk young man walked into the police station in Puertollano, in Ciudad Real province, and said he was the Playing Card Killer. For months the Madrid region had been hunting a gunman who shot strangers at random and left Spanish playing cards beside some of them, and the officers had heard such claims before. This one described a detail of the cards that only the killer and the investigators knew, a mark on the back. He was Alfredo Galán Sotillo, twenty-five, born in Puertollano on April 5, 1978. When he sobered up he recanted, but by then ballistics had tied spent cartridges found where he lived to the killings.
He had been a quiet, unremarkable student, once class president. In September 1998 he joined the Spanish army and became a corporal in the Asturias mechanized regiment in Madrid, serving on humanitarian missions in Bosnia, where he bought a Tokarev TT-33 pistol that he smuggled home hidden inside a television set. After stealing a car he was sent to the Gómez Ulla military hospital in Madrid, where he was diagnosed with neurosis and anxiety, and he kept drinking. In March 2003 he started work as a security guard at Madrid-Barajas airport. He told investigators he had wanted to know what it felt like to take a human life: "I began with the doorman, and when I felt nothing I kept on killing."
The doorman was Juan Francisco Ledesma, fifty, shot in the head at the building on Alonso Cano street in Chamberí where he worked, on January 24, 2003, in front of his two-year-old son. On February 5 the body of Juan Carlos Martín Estacio, twenty-eight, an airport cleaner, was found shot in the head, and an ace of cups lay near him. The card had been an accident. Once the press made it the killer's signature, Galán began leaving cards on purpose. Later that same day he walked into the Bar Rojas in Alcalá de Henares and opened fire. The owner, Teresa Sánchez García, thirty-eight, survived several bullets; her son, Mikel Jiménez Sánchez, eighteen, and a customer, Juana Dolores Uclés López, fifty-seven, were killed.
On March 7 he shot Santiago Eduardo Salas, twenty-seven, in the face; Salas survived, and when the pistol jammed his companion, Anahid Castillo Ruperti, twenty-nine, got away, and she said the gunman tossed a two of cups at her before leaving. On the evening of March 18, in Arganda del Rey, he shot and killed Gheorghe and Doina Magda, a Romanian couple, both forty, as they walked home from work, and left the three and four of cups. It was reported that in some of the attacks he wished his victims good morning and ordered them to kneel before he fired.
His trial before the Audiencia Provincial de Madrid began in February 2005. The court found him fully aware of what he had done, with no condition that kept him from telling right from wrong, and he declined to testify, even in answer to his own lawyer. Eyewitnesses, the weapon evidence, his clothing and his first confession convicted him. The sentence, made public on March 9, 2005, and reported by some outlets the next day, was 142 years and three months for six murders and three attempted murders, with 609,182 euros in damages to the victims.
The number is arithmetic. Under the Spanish law in force for crimes of that date, accumulated sentences were capped at an effective maximum of twenty-five years, so Spanish reporting has long expected his release around 2028, twenty-five years after his arrest. As of mid-2026 he was reported to be in prison, aged forty-eight.