Berasategui—Johana Márquez

Berasategui’s connection to Johana Márquez began as an exception to his calculated method of recruiting and directing other killers. His fixation on her overrode his usual control, drew him into the crime himself, and left a trace that investigators could use to identify him.

The Obsession Takes Shape

Amaia’s reconstruction presents Johana as the person who disrupted Berasategui’s established pattern. He was an experienced manipulator who could recognize violent offenders and channel their existing desires, but his attempt to control Johana’s father, Jasón Medina, could not succeed: Medina was too unpredictable. Berasategui nevertheless remained close to the situation, following Medina and waiting for an opportunity to act.

The decisive change was Berasategui’s own response to Johana. Amaia reasons that the girl awakened unfamiliar sensations in him, which he experienced with the intensity of infatuation. His desire to possess her became an obsession, and appetite displaced the distance and discipline that had kept his interventions indirect. Rather than merely directing another offender, he began to pursue Johana for himself; in doing so, he abandoned the pattern that had concealed his hand.

The Crime’s Divided Signature

Johana’s murder exposed the difference between the violence Berasategui could orchestrate and the violence he committed himself. Jasón Medina confessed to forcing and strangling his stepdaughter, then sexually assaulting her after death, but appeared genuinely perplexed when asked about the amputation. He said that after killing her impulsively, he had gone home to fetch a rope so he could imitate a crime he had read about; when he returned to the outbuilding, Johana’s arm was already gone. The severing was therefore not part of Medina’s account of the killing, and the missing arm pointed to another hand at the scene.

That division also linked Johana’s case to a wider pattern. Investigators found the same postmortem removal of an arm, always the same arm and with the limb missing, in cases whose perpetrators otherwise fit the familiar profile of violent, abusive men, often affected by alcohol or drugs. A prison-wall inscription of TARTTALO, scratched into the plaster with a toothbrush handle, echoed the same word and distinctive spelling associated with another offender’s suicide. These parallels suggested a signature beyond the individual murders: someone was exploiting other men’s violence while taking the arm as a trophy. Amaia’s later reconstruction placed Berasategui at the scene, following Medina and arriving at the moment Johana’s unplanned murder gave him the opportunity to take it.

The Trace That Exposed Him

Berasategui’s fixation finally made his concealed role legible. Amaia tells him that he had watched Johana, waiting for the moment he knew would come, and that he bit her at the outbuilding when he took his trophy. The bite left saliva on a small piece of flesh he had kept among the other remains. Even the possibility of doubt raised by his dental prostheses did not erase that trace. His appetite had driven him close enough to Johana to leave evidence of his own presence, converting the act that satisfied his obsession into the clue that exposed it.

When Amaia names Johana and confronts him with what he had done, Berasategui looks stricken and repeats her name, shaking his head. The response is not a denial of the underlying connection: the exchange closes on the girl whose murder had broken his usual pattern and made his private appetite visible.

From Ambiguous Injury to Evidence of a Second Hand

At first, the amputation did not establish a connection between Johana’s murder and Berasategui. Amaia Salazar noted that the arm had been severed from the elbow with a toothed but sharp implement, comparable to an electric carving knife or jigsaw, yet initially considered the removal possibly incidental. She entertained the possibilities that Jasón Medina had taken a ring or tried to prevent identification, while recognizing that neither explanation made much sense inside his own home. That early uncertainty matters: the missing arm became significant not simply because it was grotesque, but because Medina denied responsibility for it and the same unusual removal recurred elsewhere. The investigation’s changing interpretation turns an apparently secondary mutilation into evidence of a separate actor—and, ultimately, the point at which Berasategui’s exceptional involvement could be traced.

The Limits of His Influence

The connection with Johana reveals a double limit in Berasategui’s power. His method depended on identifying people whose own violent desires he could direct; as Amaia later distinguishes, his targets wanted to do what they did, even when their actions served his design. With Jasón Medina, however, Berasategui could not rely on control: Medina was unpredictable, and Johana’s murder was impulsive rather than planned. Berasategui’s response was to follow him, then intervene when the crime created an opening. The relation was therefore not a partnership or a mutual attachment but a predatory fixation that exposed the gap between directing another person’s appetite and mastering his own. Johana became the exception that joined those two roles: the intended object of Berasategui’s desire and the point at which his carefully indirect influence gave way to personal action.