Bilbao, DNA sample visit, brings the investigation into the carefully furnished home of Zuriñe Zabaleta, where a family’s private grief becomes part of Amaia Salazar’s search for links among murdered women. The visit joins a concrete request for help to a disturbing pattern: victims killed by partners, a forearm removed after death, and remains that were never fully recovered.

Setting and investigative visit

Zuriñe lived on Alameda Mazarredo, in a French-style building whose black-and-white marble entrance opened onto an interior of tall French doors, wood-panelled walls, and carefully preserved architectural details. From the sitting room, arranged to take in the view of the Guggenheim Museum, Amaia noticed a sculpture by James Wexford; Zuriñe’s evident pleasure at her compliment briefly eased their formal introduction. The refinement of the surroundings framed a conversation neither woman could keep at a distance from violence: Zuriñe said that police had come to ask about her sister’s murder, and her controlled voice faltered when she referred to the crime.

The murder and the missing remains

Amaia’s questions established that Zuriñe’s sister had been killed in an exclusive building much like the one where Zuriñe lived. The forensic report said the amputation occurred after her sister was already dead, a fact Zuriñe could not reconcile with the killing and asked why anyone would have done it. Amaia did not disclose the full investigation, but explained that Zuriñe’s help might shed light on the case and help locate the part of her sister’s remains that had not been found. She offered a cheek-swab kit, turning the family interview into a request for biological evidence as well as testimony.

The missing limb placed the case within a pattern Amaia had begun to trace across separate killings. In Lekaroz, Johana Márquez had been raped and strangled by her stepfather; her body, like Lucía Aguirre’s, had a forearm amputated at the elbow. The perpetrators in those cases had confessed and later died by suicide, leaving similar messages. Amaia also pointed to the Logroño killer’s matching message and distinctive spelling, and argued that the precision of the amputation, including a detail police had withheld in Johana’s case, was unlikely to have been copied from press reports. The repeated removal of the same arm after death, with the limb itself missing, suggested to her a shared signature rather than a coincidence among otherwise recognizable partner-abuse killings.

The wider pattern and its blind spots

The search expanded beyond the cases already compared: Amaia had identified two more women born in the valley who were killed by their partners after living elsewhere, one in Bilbao, DNA sample visit, and the other in Burgos. Their names and former addresses had been found through obituaries published by funeral homes in the valley, but the available records did not say whether either woman had suffered an amputation. The leads widened the possible victim group without yet confirming that the same signature linked every case.

The gaps were institutional as well as evidentiary. The killers had confessed, and in at least two cases had disclaimed responsibility for the amputations, claims investigators struggled to credit; the information was never cross-checked across police jurisdictions. Amaia argued that partner murders were often closed and archived quickly, especially when the perpetrator confessed and then died by suicide, while the shame felt by victims’ families further discouraged attention. Johana Márquez’s murder also complicated the emerging profile: unlike the other victims, she had not been born in the valley and was living there when she died, while her stepfather had no known history of violence. The shared mutilation therefore pointed toward a possible orchestrating hand, but the differences among victims and perpetrators still demanded explanation.

Family geography and the reopened case

Zuriñe Zabaleta’s account also locates her family between the valley and the city: her mother came from Ziga, while her father belonged to a prominent business family in Neguri. That background gives the interview a personal dimension beyond the address where it takes place, but it does not establish that her murdered sister was born in the valley. Zuriñe’s surprise that police were asking about the crime after so much time had passed underscores the distance the investigation had to cross: an old family loss had to be made legible again through testimony and forensic comparison.