Isabel Fuentes survived the first attack. Her husband hit her with a hammer while she slept on the sofa of their house in a Galician village, then made the kitchen look like a break-in. Thirty-seven days later, while she was recovering in a hospital in Ourense, he walked into her room and stabbed her. Unprotected: Murder in Galicia, a Spanish true crime documentary film for Netflix, is built on the gap between those two nights.

Jorge Laplace wrote and directed the film for True Crime Factory, the company behind Carles Porta’s Crims, with Porta and Pablo Fernández Masó as executive producers. The production’s announcement says it gathers testimony from investigators, doctors, relatives, neighbours and journalists, and tries to establish how the killing could happen and why the system did not protect her. Its Spanish title, Desprotexida, uses the Galician word for “unprotected”, in the feminine.

The question the director put on record

Laplace has framed the film around one sentence. “When I learned the story of Isabel Fuentes, what struck me most was not only the crime,” he said in the announcement, “but an uncomfortable question I could not explain to myself: how was it possible that she was murdered in a hospital when it was known that she was in danger?”

That question is the documentary’s contract with its audience, and it moves the piece away from the usual whodunit shape. The Netflix synopsis still opens like a mystery: alleged thieves leave a woman near death in her own home, and suspicion soon turns toward her inner circle. But the identity of the killer has been public record for years. What the film sets out to examine is the stretch of time between suspicion and action, and who held each piece of it.

A burglary that did not add up

The chronology of the indictment, published by the Ourense daily La Región, sets out the first night. Aniceto Rodríguez struck his wife with a hammer “with the intention of ending her life” while she was asleep on the sofa. He then staged a robbery: he disordered the kitchen, broke the glass of a window and got rid of the weapon. Isabel was admitted to the Complejo Hospitalario Universitario de Ourense.

The production’s synopsis says the Guardia Civil sergeant who took the case doubted that account from the first moment and tried to protect Isabel from a second attack. Spanish press coverage has described the same weeks from the other side: despite the warnings, no precautionary measure was put in place and the husband was not arrested. That is the documentary’s terrain. Investigators who suspected him, doctors who treated her, a family and a village that knew the couple, and the journalists who followed the case are the voices the announcement lists.

Thirty-seven days

The second attack happened on the fourth floor of the hospital, in the early hours. La Región’s chronology says Rodríguez entered the room where Isabel and another patient were sleeping and stabbed his wife twice in the chest with a kitchen knife. A security guard caught him; he had wounded himself in the abdomen, arm and neck. Prosecutors asked for 39 years. He was sentenced to 31 years for the murder and the earlier attempt, and died of a stroke in A Lama prison without serving most of it.

Spanish law treats a killing like this one as gender violence, and the country has spent two decades building specialised courts, police risk assessments and protection orders for exactly the situation the sergeant believed he was looking at. The premise of Unprotected points at the moment that machinery is supposed to switch on, and at what happens when a suspicion stays a suspicion. The film’s framing suggests less interest in the knife than in the paperwork around it: who reported what, to whom, and what each person could legally do with it.

One week before the fiction

The documentary is the first of two Netflix projects on the case. One week after it, the platform releases El crimen de Pazos, a four-episode scripted series from Bambú Producciones, the company that dramatized another Galician case in The Asunta Case. Ramón Campos, David Orea, Curro Serrano and Gema R. Neira wrote it, and Carlos Sedes directs. Tristán Ulloa plays Elías, a Guardia Civil sergeant, and Miguel Borines plays Aniceto. The fiction renames the victim Irene.

That order matters. The scripted series will have actors, a sergeant with a character arc and the structure of a thriller. The documentary arrives first with the real name and, if it delivers on its press material, the real voices: a family and a group of professionals describing what they knew and when. Viewers who watch both will be able to set the dramatization against the record, which is a stronger position than the reverse, where the fiction fixes the images before the facts arrive.

A narrower brief than most true crime

Spanish documentary true crime has its own tradition, from El caso Alcàsser to Carles Porta’s work, and a recurring argument inside it: whether these films shed light on a case or simply replay it. Unprotected has set itself a narrower and more demanding brief. Its central claim, at least as it is presented, is not that a crime was solved but that it could have been prevented, which puts the institutions in the frame alongside the husband. Whether the film holds that position for its full running time, without sliding into the suspense mechanics its own synopsis flirts with, is the thing to watch for.

The verdict settled who killed Isabel Fuentes. It did not settle the question Laplace starts from, and a sentence its subject never finished serving cannot answer it either: when the sergeant’s doubt was already on record and she was lying in a hospital bed, whose job was it to stand between her and the man who had tried once before?

When and where to watch Unprotected: Murder in Galicia

Unprotected: Murder in Galicia premieres on Netflix on Friday, November 6, 2026. It is a standalone documentary film in Spanish; Netflix has not yet published its running time. The case it covers began in the village of Pazos, in Verín (Ourense), on April 1, 2015, and ended at the Ourense hospital on May 8, 2015. Aniceto Rodríguez died in prison in 2018. El crimen de Pazos, the scripted series inspired by the same case, follows on Netflix on November 13.

Unprotected: Murder in Galicia, quick answers

Is Unprotected: Murder in Galicia a true story? Yes. It is a documentary about the real killing of Isabel Fuentes in Ourense, Galicia, built on testimony from investigators, doctors, relatives, neighbours and journalists.

Is it the same as El crimen de Pazos? No. El crimen de Pazos is a separate four-episode scripted series by Bambú Producciones, starring Tristán Ulloa, that renames the victim Irene. The documentary uses the real names.

Who made it? Jorge Laplace wrote and directed it for True Crime Factory, with Carles Porta and Pablo Fernández Masó as executive producers.

Is it a series? No. It is a single documentary film.

What happened to Aniceto Rodríguez? He was sentenced to 31 years in prison for the murder and the earlier attempt, and died of a stroke in A Lama prison in 2018.

Where can I watch it? On Netflix, from November 6, 2026.

Tags: Netflix, true crime, Carles Porta, El crimen de Pazos, Isabel Fuentes, Jorge Laplace