900 Days Without Anabel is a three-part docuseries, directed by Monica Palomero, is about the April 1993 kidnapping of Anabel Segura, a 22-year-old woman who was taken while jogging in the affluent La Moraleja neighborhood in Madrid. The case lingered for almost three years before her body was finally found in 1995; it turns out that the kidnappers strung police and Segura’s family along for months after killing her, through phone calls that didn’t yield new information and ransom handoff meetings that never materialized.
Opening Shot: A reenactment of a man opening an envelope that has a cassette tape in it, and playing it. The tape supposedly had the voice of Anabel Segura on it.
The Gist: When Anabel Segura, the daughter of a corporate executive, was kidnapped in April of 1993, the thought by law enforcement was that the ETA, a Basque separatist group known to kidnap high-profile victims, was responsible. But that theory was soon dismissed as phone calls about the ransom and meeting place came in to the family, through a Segura family attorney who appointed himself the family’s representative. The kidnappers were looking for a ransom of 150 million pesatas, about $2 million in 1993 dollars. While Segura’s family was well-off, they still needed to raise that much cash from friends and family.
A theory started to emerge that the people driving the white van that was seen in the neighborhood were lone operators who simply wanted to take someone from La Moraleja to get a big ransom. But when the family lawyer went to hand off the ransom — the police were nearby, but out of sight — no one showed up.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? 900 Days Without Anabel is reminiscent of other true crime series like Abducted In Plain Sight.
Our Take: 900 Days Without Anabel is a pretty straightforward docuseries that knows that it has a lot of information to impart, given the fact that they have all the recordings of the phone calls the kidnappers made to the Segura family — and there are dozens of them. It does use reenactments but not in an intrusive way; it’s mostly there to show how law enforcement managed to get the series of recordings from the kidnappers over the 900 days the case lasted, and to give an idea of what the neighborhood Anabel was taken from looked like.
It’s an interesting case, because the kidnappers led police on for so long, well after they killed Anabel. Because things didn’t go the way most cases like this went, even the detectives who were involved in this case, who were on a special task force that had experience with kidnappings, were flummoxed as to what exactly was going on. Thirty years later, these detectives are all still affected by this case in one way or another; one cop says that it’s faded over the decades but will always be in the back of his mind.
The series gets down to business and starts the 900 day count immediately. There is some biographical background about Anabel, but mostly in the “she was a nice girl with no enemies” way. In a lot of ways, she becomes more of a symbol than anything else as the case captures the attention of Spain. But the docuseries tries to define who she was a person so she’s not just reduced to a series of old pictures.
Sex and Skin: Nothing.
Parting Shot: After the missed handoff, the police get another call from someone who sounds completely different than the person they had been talking to.
Sleeper Star: Vanessa Garcia Marx was 14 when Anabel was kidnapped; she is the daughter of singer Manolo Escobar and was a neighbor of the Seguras. We’re mentioning her here because she takes time to praise how great of a singer her father was.
Most Pilot-y Line: Once again, the filmmakers put in someone saying that there were no cell phones at the time and the internet was just emerging, as a way to explain the very manual way the police recorded the kidnapper’s phone calls. Can we give younger viewers credit for knowing this by default?
Our Call: STREAM IT. 900 Days Without Anabel gets down to business quickly and is well-paced, explaining a complex case in a straightforward manner.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.