Ertzaintza

The Ertzaintza is the Basque police force whose presence links the emergency at the House of Armentia to the investigation and trial that follow. Officers respond to Mélanie’s call, guard Alice Espanet in hospital, and testify about what they encountered. Their work helps establish how the twins died and who was present, but the officers’ observations do not settle what Alice understood or what her calmness meant.

Emergency Response

Mélanie called for help after finding the twins dead and hearing Alice say that they were all right. The call was recorded: it lasted two minutes, included communication difficulties, sighs, crying, and disbelief, and ended only once the person on the other end understood the scale of the emergency. During the call, Alice apparently remained in her chair, unmoved and uncovered. The recording preserved details of the first response before the scene became crowded with responders.

The Ertzaintza arrived at the House of Armentia among the emergency services. For hours, ambulance lights and police vehicles illuminated the house, drawing neighbors and passersby toward it. Mélanie, who had been outside when the first wave of responders arrived, was brought into the kitchen and questioned; she was so distressed she could barely breathe or speak. The emergency thus produced contrasting accounts of composure and agitation: Alice appeared still, while the au pair was overwhelmed.

Ritxi reached the house shortly before the judge. He saw the twins’ bodies placed in large gray bags and Alice taken away in a police car, wearing pilates leggings and a loose shirt put on hastily. She was not handcuffed, a detail that gave Ritxi some reassurance. He called her name once, but she did not turn toward him. The account makes the police car the threshold between the home and the institutional process that would follow, without suggesting that her failure to respond explained her state of mind.

Custody and the Initial Investigation

After her arrest, Alice was taken to Hospital de Santiago for psychiatric examination. A police patrol remained outside her room. While she was there, scientific police had her clothes sealed in plastic evidence bags and took biological samples from her hands with swabs. The arrangement put medical assessment and criminal investigation side by side: Alice was observed as a patient while evidence was also being preserved for the case.

The next morning, two Ertzaintza officers came to the house to obtain Ritxi’s statement. One later characterized him as excessively calm. At the time, the officers told him that his account was crucial and that he would need to accompany them and answer questions. He asked for two minutes to change his shirt, still wearing the one he had worn during the previous day’s drive from Madrid, and invited them inside. Their request shows the investigation moving quickly from the emergency scene to accounts from those connected to it.

The inquiry found no evidence that anyone else had entered the house during the four hours between Mélanie’s departure and return; the security cameras recorded no such movement. The autopsy established that the children had drowned in the bathtub, and the water samples matched. At trial, officers from the Ertzaintza’s New Technologies section presented photographs recovered from Alice’s phone and computer. Thousands of images showed the babies in domestic and professional photographs, usually cared for and often smiling, with the boy more consistently smiling than the girl. These findings helped establish the circumstances of the deaths, though they could not answer the larger question of the mental state behind them.

Officers as Trial Witnesses

At trial, many Ertzaintza officers testified. Rather than give their names, they identified themselves by badge number, and the narrator describes them as practiced courtroom witnesses who seemed unshaken by the case. The first to testify were from citizen security, the group that had responded to Mélanie’s alarm. Their testimony corroborated several observable details: Alice’s calm manner, the babies’ lack of vital signs, the unusually orderly house, and Mélanie’s hysteria.

The prosecutor repeatedly asked whether Alice appeared conscious of what had happened. The officers’ answer rested on what they had seen and heard: she kept repeating that the twins were all right. That phrase could be presented as evidence of awareness, but it did not supply an uncomplicated explanation of her awareness. In the courtroom, a repeated utterance became both an observation attributed to the police and a point from which the prosecution could argue that Alice had acted with purpose.

The case’s physical evidence offered a firmer account of the crime than of the person who committed it. Cameras excluded another entrant, and the autopsy and water samples established drowning. The officers’ testimony reinforced those material facts and described the scene’s order, but the same apparent calm that they reported remained open to interpretation. The police could testify to Alice’s words and behavior; their evidence could not, by itself, resolve what those details meant.

Narrative and Institutional Role

The Ertzaintza’s role develops through distinct stages: responding to an urgent call, maintaining a guard at the hospital, gathering and presenting investigative material, and recounting the first scene in court. Its records and witnesses make the case legible as a sequence of actions and evidence. Yet the narrative distinguishes that practical clarity from psychological understanding: the forensic account can establish how the twins died without explaining the full meaning of Alice’s conduct.

That distinction also gives the officers’ testimony particular weight. Their descriptions—an orderly house, a calm accused, a distraught au pair, and a repeated assurance about the babies—are concrete, but they are not neutral conclusions about guilt or illness. At trial, the same details enter a contest over interpretation. The Ertzaintza supplies the observations from which competing accounts can be built, while the unresolved question of the “ghost” behind the crime remains beyond what observation alone can prove.