Amaia Salazar—Teniente Padua: investigative collaborators

Amaia Salazar and Teniente Padua are investigative collaborators whose work turns on a difficult distinction: Jasón Medina was responsible for murdering Johana Márquez, yet evidence surrounding the severed arm and a message left after Medina’s suicide suggests another offender may have been operating alongside him. Padua brings the unresolved pattern to Amaia because her expertise can help test the connection rather than overturn Medina’s confession.

The Johana Márquez Case

Amaia and Padua’s collaboration takes shape around the aftermath of Medina’s death. About four months before Padua speaks with her, Medina killed himself in the courthouse bathroom on the day his trial was due to begin. Padua explains that the resulting inquiry initially followed routine procedure. Its direction changed when Luis Rodríguez, the prison officer who had escorted Medina, came to Padua deeply shaken and anxious that the investigation make clear how the cutter used in the suicide had entered the courthouse, so he would not be held responsible. Rodríguez had already been connected to another prisoner’s suicide three years earlier, after prison authorities acknowledged that suicide-prevention measures should have included placing the prisoner with a cellmate.

Padua’s account gives Amaia the context for his concern, but he does not suggest that Medina was innocent. Medina had confessed in detail to raping and strangling Johana, his stepdaughter, and to abusing her after death. Amaia had also worked on the case and knew that Medina had tried, clumsily, to imitate a crime associated with the Basajaun. The unresolved issue was narrower and more disturbing: Medina denied amputating Johana’s arm, and Padua was investigating whether that act belonged to someone else.

At the courthouse, Amaia had seen Johana’s grieving mother waiting with her family as Medina was brought in. The woman’s visible strain, and her brief, silent acknowledgment of Amaia, made the human cost of the case present even before the investigation widened. Padua’s later approach asks Amaia to return to that case not to excuse Medina, but to examine what his confession did not explain.

Testing the Link Between Cases

Padua’s concern was not that Medina had been wrongly convicted in public opinion or had confessed under some unexplained pressure; it was that the confession did not account for the amputation. When Padua showed Amaia the prison photograph, the clue was a single word cut into the plaster with the handle of a toothbrush. The wall had since been painted over, but the grooves remained legible: TARTTALO. The same word, Padua learned, had been left by a Logroño wife-murderer who also killed himself in his cell. Its spelling was unusual—one T was the more common form—and the handwriting in the two cases was identical.

Padua compared the deaths and their surrounding details rather than treating the shared word as proof by itself. In both cases, a man who had killed a woman close to him died by suicide in custody, and a postmortem arm amputation stood outside the apparent logic of the domestic murder. The victims’ arms were cut off after death, and the missing limbs were not recovered. Padua’s review of further cases brought the number to three; the perpetrators otherwise fit a recognizable pattern of prolonged abuse, violence, impulsiveness, and, in some instances, alcohol or drug use. The repeated amputation of the same arm, followed by the limb’s disappearance, was the discordant feature that suggested a separate hand at work.

Amaia initially allowed that the amputation might have been incidental: a killer could have taken a ring, tried to prevent identification, or acted for some other reason. But the comparison became harder to dismiss as details accumulated. The cut on a later body was clean and postmortem, made with a toothed instrument resembling an electric saw or grinder. The forensic examiner found the technique consistent across the cuts in the photographs and assessed them as the work of a right-handed person using similar force. Yet the images could not establish the cutter’s age or sex, date the bare bones, or distinguish a surgical amputation from grave desecration. A definitive comparison required the actual remains and the tool, not photographs alone.

That limitation sharpened, rather than resolved, the problem between the two investigators. Amaia noted that the Guardia Civil held the bone samples and that police agencies’ reluctance to share material obstructed criminal investigation; she praised Padua for pursuing the crimes rather than seeking credit. The evidence could support a common technique and a recurring signature, but not yet identify its maker. Nor did it erase Medina’s responsibility: Amaia remained convinced that he had raped and killed Johana and had tried to imitate a Basajaun crime, while Padua likewise maintained that Medina was the murderer. Their inquiry therefore preserved two conclusions at once—that Medina’s guilt was real, and that the severed arm and the message could point beyond him.

Evidence Beyond the Confession

The inquiry that Padua brought to Amaia widened from a question about a missing arm into a chain of forensic findings that neither investigator could reduce to Medina’s confession. In a separate examination, infant bones—burned at one end but otherwise well preserved—were dated to approximately 150 years earlier, with a margin of error of five years. Their development indicated a newborn, either near the end of pregnancy or about a month old. A routine DNA comparison produced the unexpected result: the remains shared 25 percent of their DNA with Amaia. After the first result from Nasertic, the testing was repeated discreetly in laboratories in Zaragoza and San Sebastián, with the same match each time. The repeated result established a biological connection, though the evidence presented here does not specify the precise relationship.

Another forensic comparison linked a seventeenth-century scalpel sent from the Estella Sanatorium to material recovered from Lucía Aguirre’s remains. Doctor San Martín dated the instrument through its metal alloys and the period’s methods of casting and forging; the tooth of metal embedded in Lucía’s bone had the same alloy and workmanship. This result did not by itself identify who had used the scalpel, but it gave the investigation a material connection to test alongside the recurring amputations. The collaboration’s value lay in keeping such findings distinct: a shared technique, a genetic match, and matching metal each answered a different question and carried different limits.

Medina’s own account further clarified why the missing arm could not be treated as part of his confessed crime. Amaia remembered him crying as he admitted forcing Johana, strangling her with his hands, and sexually abusing her after death. He said he had left to fetch a rope so he could imitate a Basajaun crime he had read about; when he returned to the borda, the arm was already gone. He had also described feeling watched, even wondering whether Johana’s ghost was near. Padua’s account of this testimony preserved the distinction Amaia had been asked to investigate: Medina had committed the murder, but his actions did not explain the removal of the limb.

That distinction led to a more specific theory about the person Padua associated with the Tarttalo signature. If Johana’s murder was impulsive rather than planned, the other offender could not simply have arrived in response to a prepared scheme and taken the arm as part of it. The investigators reasoned that he must already have known Medina well enough to recognize the kind of killer he was, and that the timing pointed to surveillance: he had followed Medina and was present to take the trophy when the opportunity arose. The theory did not turn the recurring mark into proof of a name, but it reframed the relationship between the crimes—from imitation by the confessed killer to an unseen offender exploiting the aftermath of his violence.

Institutional Limits and Working Trust

Padua’s approach to Amaia was also a response to the limits of his authority. The Johana Márquez case was officially closed after Medina’s death, while the Logroño investigation belonged to the Policía Nacional; Padua’s superiors saw too little evidence to reopen either. He had pursued the connection on his own, following what the prison officer had told him, and needed an investigator capable of assessing whether the repeated signs justified looking beyond the settled cases. His request was therefore cautious: he wanted to establish that the crimes were unrelated if that was what the evidence showed, not to claim a link before it could be tested.

The message marked Amaia as a participant in that test. Padua explained that she was already connected to the case and that Medina’s note was addressed to her; as she examined the name written on its envelope, the investigation became a matter she could not treat as someone else’s speculation. Their collaboration rests on this division of work: Padua brings an overlooked pattern forward despite institutional reluctance, while Amaia weighs it against the established evidence and the limits of forensic interpretation. Neither treats suspicion as proof, and neither allows Medina’s proven guilt to make the unexplained evidence disappear.