The Jade·Alice Trial

The Jade/Alice Trial is the courtroom confrontation over Alice Espanet’s killing of her twin babies and her criminal responsibility for it. Its decisive question is not only what happened, but how the evidence should be narrated: as a deliberate crime or as an act committed during postpartum psychosis. The Narrator attends hoping the proceedings will unlock her book, only to discover that the trial itself is a struggle between stories—and that watching Alice testify unsettles the version she had expected to believe.

Background and the return to the case

The Narrator had begun to consider putting her work aside. She imagined replacing the case with an account of her own experience of motherhood, but feared that pages of baby-care details and alternating exhaustion and affection would become repetitive. Returning to her job seemed a way to regain distance, and she prepared to put the manuscript in the freezer indefinitely.

That plan collapsed on the last day of August, during the family’s final afternoon of vacation. As Erik gathered olive pits and used napkins near their table, The Narrator opened a newspaper and read that Alice’s trial was imminent. Jury selection was expected in mid-September, fourteen months after the deaths. The news arrived sooner than she had expected and caught her at a moment when her ambitions were faltering. She concluded that she had to be in the courtroom: to see Alice’s face, hear her voice, and follow every gesture. The prospect immediately revived the obsessive concentration with which she had once approached the case. Her practical obstacle was time; she had work briefings the next morning and only hours to arrange an extension of her leave.

The trial had been preceded by an unusual turn in Alice’s legal fortunes. The day after the twins’ cremation, Ritxi contacted his trusted lawyer to find the city’s best criminal defense attorney. The case went to Carmela Basaguren, a feminist lawyer nearing retirement, who accepted it that same day. Her immediate objective was to secure Alice’s release from Zaballa Prison. The appeal argued that pretrial detention was unnecessary, citing her roots in the area and the absence of a flight risk or likelihood of reoffending. It also announced the defense’s central position: that Alice should be acquitted on the ground of mental incapacity under Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which exempts a person unable to understand the unlawfulness of an act or act in accordance with that understanding because of a psychological disorder.

The prosecution opposed release, stressing the gravity of the accusation: two murders, aggravated by kinship, carrying the prospect of forty years’ imprisonment. The judge nevertheless granted the defense’s request. Alice surrendered her passport, had to report to the courts every fifteen days, and was released after posting bail of fifty thousand euros. The release did not resolve the question of responsibility; it set the stage for the trial in which the competing accounts would be tested.

Alice’s testimony and the courtroom’s competing stories

The Narrator is caught off guard when Alice is called to testify early in the proceedings. The first marked disturbance among the spectators comes as Alice says her name into the microphone. The Narrator watches not only what she says but how she says it: her measured pauses, fluent Spanish with a pronounced accent, controlled voice, and composure under questioning. Alice appears to her as a skilled performer, capable of balancing emotion and reason. That impression soon collides with the substance of the testimony.

Asked to describe the events, Alice presents them as her worst nightmare. She says she had feared being alone with the babies because she thought there would come a day when she could no longer resist an impulse. Although she had seemed better at the time and painting helped her, she had only recently begun spending short periods alone with the twins. She describes a sudden darkening and a loss of memory. When awareness returned, she says, she found the babies wet and cold on the bed and tried unsuccessfully to breastfeed them. She recalls nothing after that until waking in hospital.

The account breaks the spell for The Narrator. The imagery of a ghost, a shadow, dark clouds, and amnesia strikes her as a confusing collection of clichés, not the detailed and coherent explanation she had hoped to hear. She had wanted to believe Alice, or at least understand her, and now questions the impulse to give a murderer aesthetic depth. Yet the courtroom does not respond as she does: two jurors discreetly wipe away tears, and the room falls silent. After the testimony, Alice returns to her seat calmly, looking down as she adjusts her skirt. Carmela Basaguren gives her a brief, affectionate touch on the shoulder.

The Narrator’s reaction becomes part of her understanding of the trial’s form. She sees it as a contest between two constructed accounts, made from the same underlying elements but arranged differently. The prosecution interprets evidence one way; the defense offers another reading. The jury must decide which account seems coherent and credible, and which body or ghost to believe. The Narrator also chooses to remain an observer rather than write to Alice. She believes she will not find the answer by asking Alice directly, and keeps to the distance of a watcher.

Evidence, diagnosis, and doubt

Police officers from the citizen-security division testify first among the officers who answered Mélanie’s alarm. They identify themselves by badge number rather than name and appear accustomed to court. Their accounts corroborate Alice’s calm demeanor, the babies’ lack of vital signs, the scrupulous order of the house, and the nanny’s hysteria. Asked whether Alice seemed conscious of what had happened, officers say she repeatedly reassured those present that the children were all right, as if she had completed a mission. The contrast between a neat house and a scene of death, and between Alice’s calm and the nanny’s distress, gives the prosecution material to interpret; it does not, by itself, settle what Alice understood.

The hospital psychiatrists who initially treated Alice confirm that she was in shock, disoriented, amnesic, and in denial during her admission. The longer expert testimony comes from Dr. Leclercq, a Belgian psychiatrist who had treated Alice throughout the year. Based in Barcelona, he had conducted their sessions in French and had carried out pioneering research into postpartum depression and psychosis in Belgium in the late 1970s. At Carmela Basaguren’s request, he explains the distinction between ordinary baby blues, postpartum depression, and postpartum psychosis. He describes baby blues as common and usually temporary, while persistent or worsening symptoms may require treatment; postpartum psychosis, he says, can involve a real risk of harm to the mother or baby and may require immediate hospitalization.

Dr. Leclercq calls Alice’s case clear and says she suffered psychosis. He explains that an impulse to harm a baby may be experienced as alien and distressing, or, during psychosis, as something the patient believes must be done. Asked why he believes Alice was in an acute phase, he points to her account that she felt an impulse and gave in rather than resisting it. The prosecution then presses the basis of his conclusion. Alice had no psychiatric history and no bipolar disorder, a condition associated with heightened risk. There was no official diagnosis at the time of the deaths; Dr. Leclercq relies on his later evaluations and on Alice’s reported account and conduct. He agrees that these are the basis of his diagnosis. The exchange leaves the central difficulty visible: the same account that supports the diagnosis is also testimony from the accused.

Verdict and aftermath

The case’s outcome carries the defense’s distinction between criminal guilt and mental responsibility into the sentence. The jury finds Alice guilty but accepts the defense of insanity, and the judge replaces imprisonment with psychiatric treatment on an outpatient basis. Alice is not sent to a psychiatric institution. In discussing the decision afterward, the case is presented as a possible turning point in debate about mental illness and criminal punishment, and as a challenge to a system that has often improvised its response to mentally ill offenders.

The choice of outpatient treatment is also defended as practical. Spain has only two prison psychiatric hospitals, in Alicante and Seville; placing Alice in one would seriously disrupt her family. The conditions cited in support of outpatient care include her financial situation and Ritxi’s commitment, alongside institutional oversight of her treatment and rehabilitation. The result therefore does more than close the courtroom dispute: it makes the family’s circumstances and the availability of care part of the legal response.

For The Narrator, the trial supplies no simple revelation that turns Alice into either a wholly comprehensible patient or an inexplicable criminal. Instead, it sharpens the book’s central problem: evidence does not arrive without interpretation, and the courtroom’s judgment depends on which account can hold together facts, diagnosis, and responsibility. The Narrator’s initial wish to scrutinize Alice for the key to the case gives way to a more uneasy recognition that the decisive answer is produced through competing testimony and the jury’s act of belief.