Alice and Alex

Alice and Alex’s relationship is part of a maternal bond narrated through stark reversals: a birth marked by separation and medical vulnerability, a household in which care was divided and unsettled, and the deliberate drowning of Alex and his twin, Angela. The court’s later examination of Alice’s mental state shaped how her responsibility for the deaths was understood, but the precise order in which the twins died remains unknown.

Birth and early separation

Alice gave birth to the twins by scheduled cesarean in the thirty-seventh week of pregnancy. The operation was arranged because one fetus, the girl, was breech and Alice had low amniotic fluid. After the babies were delivered, they were taken away while Alice remained in the recovery room. Her blood pressure fell; she trembled and could not move her hands because of the anesthesia. She was intensely thirsty but was not allowed water, and Ritxi tried to ease her discomfort by passing lemon-juice swabs over her tongue and gums. Alice did not know whether the babies were well, and she was too weak to ask. One baby was placed in an incubator with low birth weight, hypoglycemia, a low platelet count, and respiratory distress. The other was also kept in the neonatal unit for the day, as a precaution. A psychiatrist later argued that a planned cesarean and the separation immediately after birth could affect early bonding. The Narrator, recalling her own separation from Erik, regarded that account as alarmist; the testimony formed part of the trial’s effort to explain Alice’s relationship with her babies, not proof of a particular cause for what followed.

Care in the household

Mélanie, the au pair, worked in Alice and Ritxi’s home from the time the babies were a month old until the events that ended their lives. Her testimony portrayed a caregiving arrangement whose emotional climate could shift. At times Alice closely supervised how Mélanie held the babies, changed their diapers, or applied cream. At other times Alice said she was going to paint, withdrew to her studio, and left Mélanie to manage the children alone. Mélanie preferred those periods of distance, despite the heavier workload. When Alice remained near, Mélanie described her as volatile and critical, or as depressed and discouraged. Alice worried over the babies’ weight, whether they seemed too thin or too fat, how little or how much they slept, and whether they might be ill. The evidence depicts her involvement as intense but unstable: the children’s ordinary needs repeatedly became a focus of supervision and distress. It does not establish that the twins experienced these episodes identically or reveal Alex’s individual responses.

The twins’ deaths and the recovery of their names

The account of the killings places them on a Thursday afternoon, when the nanny was not working and Ritxi was away. Alice gave the twins half a pear mashed with a fork, followed by some bottle-feeding; the autopsy confirmed that this was their last meal. She undressed them and drowned them one after the other. The narrative leaves the exact sequence unsettled: Alice said she could not remember which child she killed first, and the forensic evidence could establish only that both died at roughly the same time. It therefore does not securely identify Alex as either the first or the second child killed. The children’s names became significant in court because The Narrator had previously known them only as the babies, the twins, or the bodies and ashes. The prosecutor was the first to say Alex and Angela aloud. The Narrator realized then that she had not known their names and had not noticed their absence. Naming them made the deaths harder to absorb, but it also distinguished the children from the impersonal categories through which the case had been discussed. Alex’s relationship with Alice is inseparable from Angela’s in the surviving account: both were her children, and both were killed.

Mental state and legal aftermath

Alice’s defense advanced an argument based on mental incapacity under Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which provides an exemption from criminal responsibility when a psychological disorder prevents a person from understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding. At trial, the prosecutor pressed a psychiatrist on the evidentiary basis for diagnosing Alice with postpartum psychosis. The psychiatrist acknowledged that there was no official diagnosis and that the assessment relied on Alice’s conduct and her own account, alongside recent evaluations. The jury found Alice guilty but accepted the defense of insanity, and the judge replaced imprisonment with outpatient psychiatric treatment. The legal outcome did not undo the destruction of the mother-child relationship; it placed the question of Alice’s responsibility alongside the unresolved question of how her mental state should be understood. For Alex, the narrative’s movement from an unnamed baby to a child identified in court marks a small but consequential recovery of personhood within a case otherwise dominated by the act of his death.