«Libre la asesina. Libre el fantasma.»

«Libre la asesina. Libre el fantasma.» is the Narrator’s compressed, unsettling response to Alice Espanet’s release from prison. The sentence joins a concrete legal reversal to an image of haunting: Alice is free, but the deaths at the center of the case remain present, and the figure of the ghost carries the aftermath beyond the courtroom.

The release behind the phrase

The words follow Ritxi’s decision to find Alice a strong criminal defense. The day after the twins’ cremation, he broke his isolation in La Rioja Alavesa, contacted his trusted lawyer, and asked for the city’s best criminal attorney. The lawyer brought in Carmela Basaguren, a feminist advocate nearing retirement, who accepted the case that same day. Her immediate goal was to secure Alice’s release from Zaballa prison.

Basaguren’s appeal argued that pretrial detention was unnecessary: the defense cited Alice’s roots in the community, the lack of flight risk, and the absence of a danger that she would reoffend. It also announced a central strategy for the eventual case: seeking acquittal on the ground of mental incapacity under Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which exempts a person from criminal responsibility when a mental disorder prevents her from understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding.

The prosecution opposed release, emphasizing the gravity of the accusation: two murders, an aggravating family relationship, and a potential sentence of forty years. The judge nevertheless granted the defense’s request. Alice was released after surrendering her passport, undertaking to report to court every fifteen days, and paying bail of fifty thousand euros. The phrase’s first declaration, that the accused is free, thus follows a sharply defined judicial decision rather than a final determination of her responsibility.

A sentence divided between law and haunting

The expression’s two short clauses do not resolve the contradiction surrounding Alice; they sharpen it. “The killer” names the accusation in its most damning form, while “the ghost” shifts the sentence from legal status to the residue the case leaves behind. The repeated word “free” gives the clauses a parallel shape, but their meanings do not settle into a single conclusion: release from prison does not make the deaths disappear, and the legal question of culpability remains contested.

That uncertainty is reinforced by the trial’s dispute over psychiatric evidence. The prosecutor established that the doctor had no official diagnosis to rely on; his assessment of postpartum psychosis rested on Alice’s behavior and her own account. He agreed that those were the bases for his diagnosis, answering the challenge without claiming a separate, definitive confirmation. The expression’s ghost therefore belongs not only to the deaths but also to the unresolved boundary between a criminal accusation and an explanation grounded in mental illness.

The ghost in a wider history

The paragraph immediately following the expression turns to La Llorona, a mythic mother who kills her children and then wanders in grief as a restless soul near water. That placement gives “ghost” a cultural resonance beyond a general image of haunting: the Narrator moves from Alice’s release to a recurring story in which maternal infanticide, guilt, and spectral wandering are linked. The connection is made by sequence and motif, not by declaring Alice to be the mythic figure.

The surrounding discussion also sets the case against changing legal accounts of infanticide. In Spain, infanticide existed as a distinct offense from 1822 until the 1995 Criminal Code abolished that category; earlier law framed a mother’s killing of a newborn in terms of concealing her dishonor. The Narrator contrasts that history with Canada’s provision for infanticide involving a child under one year old when pregnancy, childbirth, or lactation has disturbed the mother’s mental state. Against this backdrop, the phrase’s stark label of “killer” sits uneasily beside legal traditions that have treated a mother’s circumstances as grounds for a different account of criminal responsibility.

Release without a final resolution

The case’s eventual disposition extends the phrase’s contrast between liberty and lingering consequence. Following the jury’s decision, the court substituted psychiatric treatment for imprisonment and chose outpatient care, so Alice would not be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The explanation given for that choice points to the availability of only two prison psychiatric hospitals in Spain, both far from the family, and to circumstances presented as supporting outpatient treatment: Alice’s financial position and her husband’s commitment. Institutions were to monitor her treatment and rehabilitation.

The expression thus anticipates no simple ending in which freedom cancels the past. Its force comes from holding two conditions together: Alice’s actual release and the continuing presence of the accusation, the deaths, and the unresolved questions of mental illness and responsibility. In the book’s movement from courtroom procedure to myth and legal history, the ghost is less a supernatural answer than an image for what the decision cannot put to rest.