Príamo Ferro’s confession and arrest bring the killing of Honorato Bonafé into the open, but they do not close the larger mystery of the deaths at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Ferro says he killed Bonafé and asks Lorenzo Quart to deliver him to the police; his later signed statement confirms responsibility for that death while leaving the earlier deaths unresolved. The distinction between confession, police reconstruction, and proof remains central to the episode—and to its uncertain aftermath.

The deaths surrounding the church

Before Ferro confesses, the church has already acquired a reputation for fatal accidents. Aquilino Corvo describes the death of Peñuelas, a municipal architect sent to prepare a report declaring the building unsafe. After quarrelling with Ferro, Peñuelas fell when a wooden scaffold rail gave way and was impaled on a metal pipe. Another official was present, as was Óscar Lobato, who administered the last rites. Corvo presents the death as bad luck rather than a crime.

The death of Father Urbizu also receives an accidental explanation. With no witnesses, Simeón Navajo’s investigators propose that movement of a scaffold dislodged a large piece of plaster from the cornice above. The piece, weighing more than ten kilograms, struck Urbizu on the head. These accounts establish the pattern against which Bonafé’s death is judged: the church is a dangerous, deteriorating worksite, but successive deaths also make ordinary explanations harder to accept without scrutiny.

The building’s precarious future gives those deaths a material context. Under a privilege dating to 1687, the church could not be secularized and demolished while a Thursday Mass was said for its benefactor, Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. Macarena Bruner explains that the Mass took place at eight in the morning, the hour associated with the day of Gaspar’s death in 1709. Each Thursday, an emissary of the archbishop and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watched for a missed Mass or a procedural irregularity that might clear the way for demolition. The parish’s survival thus depended on a repeated rite that placed its priest under institutional and commercial pressure.

Bonafé’s death and Ferro’s confession

When Quart and Navajo encounter Bonafé’s body in the church, it lies partly covered by blue canvas near the open confessional. A hand remains visible, palm upward, with a wound running from the wrist toward the index finger. The placement is striking, but it does not by itself explain how Bonafé died or who was responsible.

The decisive admission comes later. Ferro tells Quart that when he shut the sacristy door, Bonafé was already dead inside the confessional. Quart asks how Ferro can be certain. Ferro answers that he killed him, then tells Quart that he should hand him over to the police. Macarena turns away, suppressing a groan; Pencho Gavira lights another cigarette. Ferro rises and fumbles with the buttons of his cassock. His confession is not presented as a calculated defense: he rejects the possibility of an alibi or testimony that could rescue him and makes surrender the immediate consequence of his admission.

At the police station, Navajo reports that Ferro has signed his statement and confirms that it says he killed Bonafé. On being questioned about Peñuelas and Urbizu, however, Ferro neither admits nor denies responsibility. The confession therefore has a sharply limited scope. It gives the police a declared killer for the newest death, but it does not establish that the earlier deaths were crimes or resolve whether they were accidents.

The police reconstruction and its limits

Navajo reconstructs a possible sequence from the scene. Bonafé was apparently on the scaffolding by the main altar, beside the Virgin’s image, and Ferro climbed up after him. The two may have argued or struggled. Bonafé then fell, or was pushed, from a height of five metres. The wound on his hand could have come from trying to catch a scaffold bolt as he fell.

The reconstruction continues below. Bonafé was badly injured but still alive; unable to walk, he dragged himself several metres and collapsed in the confessional, where he died. The location of the body and the wound on the hand fit this account, but Navajo’s own alternatives—Bonafé falling or being pushed, an argument or a struggle—show where the evidence stops short of certainty. Ferro’s confession establishes his claimed responsibility, while the exact movements and circumstances of the killing remain a police reconstruction rather than a fully witnessed account.

Navajo also supplies a possible motive. Months earlier, the church’s original pearls had been replaced with twenty imitations. A Madrid art dealer, Francisco Montegrifo, may have circulated the pearls associated with Captain Xaloc; police information points toward his involvement, but does not prove it. The money from the substitution appears to have coincided with the resumption of restoration work. Suppliers told Navajo’s men that the building materials and rented machinery cost more than Ferro’s stipend and the parish collection could have covered.

On that basis, Navajo supposes that Bonafé discovered the false pearls and confronted Ferro, perhaps attempting blackmail—or perhaps arriving while Ferro was already at work. He imagines Ferro locking the sacristy door, spending a couple of hours in the tower of Casa del Postigo, and then disappearing for a day. The financial trail offers a plausible explanation for how repairs were funded and a possible reason for a confrontation; it does not prove that the pearls supplied the motive for murder. Ferro refuses to explain his disappearance, and Quart does not fill that gap for Navajo.

Judgment and aftermath

Quart later learns that Ferro was held in a prison hospital, tried, and found responsible for involuntary homicide. The verdict gives the case a legal outcome, but its classification is not identical to Ferro’s stark spoken admission: the court’s finding locates his responsibility within involuntary homicide, while the precise account of the encounter remains uncertain in the evidence available to Quart.

Ferro is subsequently confined in a supervised diocesan residence for elderly priests. His health is precarious, and he spends his days alone in his room. On fair nights, accompanied by an attendant, he goes into the garden and sits silently on a bench looking at the stars. The man who had demanded to be surrendered to the police ends in isolation under church supervision, his public confession followed not by an explanation of every death but by a quiet, diminishing life.

The case also changes the status of the earlier deaths. In the first discussions, Corvo and Navajo describe Peñuelas’s and Urbizu’s deaths as accidents. After Ferro’s statement, Navajo says the police must reopen those investigations because Ferro has neither affirmed nor denied involvement. Suspicion widens, but no further confession or finding is reported here. The narrative preserves that difference between an unresolved question and an established crime.

The church and the unfinished case

Ferro’s confession does not decide whether the church’s earlier deaths were connected to him, nor does the proposed pearl motive become conclusive proof. It does, however, expose how the parish’s survival, the restoration money, the substituted pearls, and the deaths converge around one vulnerable building. The weekly Mass for Gaspar Bruner is both a condition protecting the church from demolition and a point of surveillance by those waiting for it to fail.

The eventual outcomes resist a simple resolution. A later letter from Óscar Lobato tells Quart that Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas remains open for worship and continues to function as a parish. Ferro, by contrast, is alive but in declining health, separated from parish life and increasingly alone. His admission settles who he says killed Bonafé; it does not settle the whole history of violence at the church. The confession is therefore an ending for one charge and a reopening of the mystery around the others.