Braulio Iriarte

Braulio Iriarte is an investigator on the team pursuing the Tarttalo crimes, whose defining pattern joins intimate-partner violence to postmortem arm amputations and deliberately planted clues. He helps frame the distinction at the heart of the inquiry: the men who directly attack women may be perpetrators, but the repeated signature points toward someone else directing events from behind them.

Casework and Evidence

On the morning he takes Amaia Salazar to Pamplona, Iriarte says little beyond brief updates about the case and concentrates on driving. At the police briefing, however, he is among the investigators already familiar with the evidence connecting the desecrations at Arizkun to Amaia’s family. The team has established that the bones were placed there intentionally, and that the visitor to Rosario’s sanatorium obtained information that made it possible to locate them.

The briefing also sets out the physical consistency of the amputations. The cuts had first suggested an electric knife or jigsaw, but a metal tooth recovered from Lucía Aguirre’s body points instead to an old manual amputation saw. The detail matters because Johana Márquez’s body was found in a place without electricity: the apparent signature was not merely a repeated result, but evidence of a particular tool and a deliberate method.

The Instigator Theory

Iriarte argues that the men who carry out the attacks may be violent but disorganized servants of a more calculating instigator. In his account, this person knows how to recognize and recruit likely killers, then steers their anger toward the women around them. The instigator’s control may extend even to inducing the men to die by suicide once they have served their purpose.

The team’s discussion of Jasón Medina’s account sharpens the problem Iriarte’s theory addresses. Medina confessed to strangling Johana and sexually assaulting her, yet appeared perplexed when asked about the missing arm. He had left the body to fetch a rope, intending to imitate a crime he had read about; when he returned, the arm was gone. Investigators therefore ask how the Tarttalo could have been present at precisely the right moment. The possibility that he had been following Medina offers a way to understand the timing without mistaking the direct killer for the person who took the trophy.

Role in the Investigation

Iriarte’s significance lies in shifting the inquiry from matching violent offenders to identifying the hand that may be guiding them. His theory accommodates both the killers’ recognizable patterns of abuse and the more controlled, repeated acts that do not fit those patterns: the same postmortem amputation, the missing limb, and a distinctive mark left across cases. He does not name the instigator in these scenes, but his account gives the team a working distinction between the men who commit the violence and the person who may select, direct, and exploit them.