On an August morning in 2017, a Spanish engineer named Antonio Navarro Cerdán left his home in the quiet Valencian neighbourhood of Patraix to head off to work, just as he would every other weekday. But on this particular Wednesday, Antonio never made it to the office; he didn’t even get behind the wheel of his car. As he made his way through his building’s garage, he was stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife and left to die in the car park.
When she learned of his harrowing murder, Antonio’s wife María slipped into the role of the grieving widow, aghast at this seemingly random attack. It didn’t take long, though, for suspicion to turn upon María herself. Was she in fact the black widow at the centre of a spider’s web of infidelity, jealousy and deceit?
Welcome to the world of Netflix’s latest hit, A Widow’s Game, which has set up residence in the streamer’s top 10 films since its release last week. While this tale might sound straight out of a particularly overheated telenovela, the movie is in fact based on a real murder case that gripped Spain a few years back.
With a touch of hindsight, it’s not hard to see why the film has got its claws into viewers. It has all the makings of a Netflix B-list success story, the sort of project that doesn’t get much hype in the lead-up to its release (in fact, reviews have been decidedly mixed, to put it politely) yet still manages to shoot up the charts and cling on for dear life. And if its lead star Ivana Baquero looks vaguely familiar, that’s probably thanks to her childhood role as Ofelia, the heroine of Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical epic Pan’s Labyrinth.
It’s a straightforward murder-mystery procedural, with the added frisson that comes with being “based on a true story”, albeit one that the majority of us, outside Spain at least, might not already be familiar with. It’s set under the Valencian sun, and there’s plenty of extramarital sex, too. Essentially, it’s solid, scandalous fare, the sort of stuff that people actually gobble up on Netflix (albeit perhaps with one eye on their phone, if they’ve opted for the dubbed version rather than subtitles).
And while many true-crime offerings dress up their salacious tales with platitudes about honouring victims, this one is, for better or worse, almost brutally straightforward in its aims. “This film is not about the victim,” executive producer Ramon Campo said in a statement. “It is about the murderers.”
The story that underpins it, though, is arguably even more shocking than the film makes out. In photos, Antonio and María, nicknamed Maje, seemed like a perfect couple: good-looking, smiling, apparently carefree and happy in each other’s company. But if schlocky Netflix dramas have taught us anything, it’s that appearances are almost always deceptive. Maje, who was nine years her husband’s junior, was in fact serially unfaithful to Antonio (who’s been renamed as Arturo in the film).
In photos, Antonio and María seemed like a perfect couple: good-looking, smiling, apparently carefree and happy in each other’s company
One of Maje’s lovers was Salvador Rodrigo Lapiedra, a colleague at the hospital where she worked as a nurse. Salvador was 20 years her senior, already married with a daughter around her age; the movie leans into classic tropes to inevitably paint him as a middle-aged has-been who’s dangerously flattered by the attention from his beautiful young co-worker.
Reports from the Spanish press suggest that the relationship came to a head when the couple were having lunch at Salvador’s farmhouse in Ribarroja: Maje told her boyfriend that Antonio was psychologically abusive and controlling, and that she wanted him to die. The couple set about putting together a plan for his murder, using Maje’s in-depth knowledge of the mundanities of her husband’s daily routine in order to find a time when he might be vulnerable.
It would later transpire that Salvador wasn’t the first person Maje had tried to recruit into this grim plan; she’d told previous lovers a similar story about Antonio (despite the fact that there was no evidence that he’d ever been abusive). But why opt for murder when, well, divorce exists? According to later testimony from Salvador, she saw the scheme as a way of getting rid of her husband, while getting to keep his inheritance and pension as a means of financial support.
Salvador would eventually dispose of the murder weapon by throwing it in a septic tank at his farmhouse. Maje, meanwhile, got stuck into performing the part of the widow in mourning, reportedly reading an emotional farewell letter at his funeral. Initially, the police were confused as to what might be the motive for such a horrifying act; nothing had been stolen from Antonio, so it didn’t appear to be a robbery gone wrong.
But when officers shifted their investigation to focus on those closest to the victim, they were soon confronted with evidence of Maje’s secret life. A wiretap on her phone captured a message to a friend, in which she admitted to feeling free after the death (and noted that she was already collecting his pension). Not long after, she and Rodrigo made a series of incriminating calls to one another, discussing the aftermath of their plan. Let’s just say that wasn’t exactly the smartest move – the duo were eventually arrested in January the following year.
The next twist in this bleak tale, though, is strangely rushed through by the creators of A Widow’s Game, confined to a few lines in the end credits. At first, Salvador was happy to take the rap for his girlfriend, claiming that he and he alone was responsible for Antonio’s death. But then, he changed his mind. What prompted this about turn? He’d learned that Maje had struck up a relationship with another inmate while in custody. This betrayal spurred him to change his statement to better reflect her involvement. “I said it was all my idea – but it was both of us,” he said, in a recording that plays in the film’s final moments.
His defence lawyers would eventually argue that he had been manipulated, and that he only went along with the plot because of his infatuation. Maje, meanwhile, continued to deny any involvement in her husband’s death, even as the evidence piled up against her. In October 2020, Salvador was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 17 years in prison – but Maje would end up being handed the harsher punishment. She was found guilty of murder, with kinship as an aggravating circumstance, and received 22 years.
The story only becomes more convoluted from there. While in prison in Picassent, Maje began another relationship with a different inmate, a man known only as David, who’d been convicted of a 2008 murder. Picassent, it’s worth noting, was Europe’s first mixed penitentiary, where male and female prisoners share communal space and take part in activities together. It’s not an anomaly, either: around 20 coed prison blocks are currently in operation across Spain.
A few months into this romance, Maje became pregnant, and gave birth to a baby boy in 2023. Since then, she’s been continuing her sentence in a mother and child unit at another prison in Alicante, where she’ll likely remain until her son turns three.
It’s a strange, sad coda to a strange, sad story – and yet more proof that the truth really is stranger than fiction.
A Widow’s Game is streaming on Netflix now
