The discovery of Lucía Aguirre’s body began when Ramón Quiralte identified where he had buried her, turning a confession into a search for a grave—and a crucial scene of forensic evidence. In Azanza, the excavation would expose not only the victim’s remains but also a clue connecting her death to a wider pattern of violence.

The Coordinates and the Search

Quiralte described the chosen place through a memory of his father’s work making patxaran, a sloe-berry liqueur, near Azanza. After the harvest, employees could take berries left on the thorny blackthorn bushes. He said he had thought the brush would be the best place for her. When asked whether he had buried her there, he confirmed it, and Judge Markina ordered him to accompany the investigators and show them the location.

Rather than draw a map, Quiralte wrote a short sequence of numbers and letters: coordinates. Amaia Salazar recognized them as longitude and latitude. The team traced them to a plantation near Azanza, a small town in the Estella district whose principal industry was patxaran production. By the time the investigators had gathered and found the indicated spot, dusk was falling. Small white blossoms covered the trees, making the plantation resemble a corridor more than an improvised cemetery.

Amaia had insisted on bringing a canopy despite the rush. Although rain was not expected, she wanted to prevent any precipitation from compromising possible evidence around the grave. As technicians set up lights and began to dig, the fading daylight and the carefully protected site marked the transition from Quiralte’s account to the physical examination of the burial.

The Grave Opened

The excavation first yielded a black plastic wrapping. When the bundle was exposed, the team saw that the body had been enclosed in two large garbage bags, one over the head and the other over the feet, joined around the woman’s waist with paper tape. The tape had come loose; stirred by a light breeze, it fluttered as if the body were moving beneath the earth. A stronger gust exposed the victim’s red-and-white sweater. Amaia Salazar recognized it from a dream, and the recognition sent a shiver through her.

She ordered photographs from every angle. While the photographers worked, she stepped back, crossed herself, and bowed her head to pray for the victim. Then, absorbed by what she was seeing, she asked Doctor San Martín to cut farther into the wrapping. He opened it down to the knees, allowing Amaia to examine the body more closely.

With the corpse lying on its side, the right arm was partly hidden beneath it. Amaia knelt beside the grave, felt along the shoulder and forearm, then carefully reached beneath the body at the biceps and drew the arm into view. It had been amputated at the elbow in a straight, assured cut. There was no blood; the rounded bone and dry tissue around it were visible. Jonan Etxaide, holding the plastic, lost his balance and landed on the ground as the arm was uncovered.

The sight abruptly overwhelmed Amaia. She recoiled, then, at Jonan’s prompting, returned to the immediate demands of the investigation: she ordered him to leave with her, stripped off her gloves, and ran toward the car. Before going, she turned to Judge Markina and instructed him to have Ramón Quiralte kept under exhaustive surveillance in prison, with someone assigned to watch him if necessary. The burial had now yielded more than the location of Lucía Aguirre’s remains: the severed arm made the grave a possible link to another killing.

Forensic Comparisons and Wider Implications

The arm’s clean edge prompted a forensic comparison with the mutilation in the Johana Márquez case. Doctor San Martín determined that the cut on Lucía Aguirre had been made after death, when the heart had stopped and the blood had begun to coagulate. The toothed mark suggested a powered cutting tool: perhaps an electric wood saw, though the pattern also brought an electric knife or grinder to mind. In the earlier case, investigators had assumed that Johana Márquez’s father was responsible and had compared tools from his home and car without finding a match; the object used to amputate her arm had not been investigated further. The resemblance between the injuries reopened a line of inquiry that the first investigation had left incomplete.

The comparison remained suggestive rather than conclusive. San Martín found that the cuts shown in the available photographs shared a technique and appeared to have been made by a right-handed person with comparable force and confidence. But photographs of stripped bones could not establish the victims’ ages or sexes, date the bones reliably, or determine whether an arm had been surgically removed or taken in a desecration. All the visible bones were adult forearms, yet a definitive comparison required the physical samples: investigators could make casts, scan the cuts, and superimpose the results. The Guardia Civil held the relevant remains, and the limits on sharing evidence left the comparison short of proof.

A later material analysis supplied a different kind of connection. Doctor San Martín reported that an antique scalpel sent from the Estella sanatorium dated to the seventeenth century, based on its metal alloys and the method used to cast and forge it. The metal tooth embedded in Lucía Aguirre’s bone had the same alloy and forging. That match tied a feature of her remains to an identifiable historical instrument, while also sharpening the distinction between what the evidence established—the shared metalwork—and what it did not, by itself, establish about how the weapon had reached the scene or who had used it.

A Separate Bone Trail

The resemblance between Lucía Aguirre’s severed arm and the cuts in the Johana Márquez case entered a wider investigation already shaped by another, markedly different bone discovery. Testing of an arm bone found at the Arizkun Church showed that it belonged to a newborn—approximately nine months before birth or one month after it—and was about 150 years old, with an estimated margin of error of five years. Unlike the adult forearm recovered from Lucía’s grave, this fragment had been burned at one end and belonged to a much older burial context; its significance could not be inferred from resemblance alone.

The infant bone’s DNA nevertheless produced an unexpected present-day connection: it showed a 25 percent match with Amaia Salazar. That result redirected the investigation toward Amaia’s family history, where an obstetric record listed a twin birth in 1980 and a death certificate recorded a newborn daughter of Juan Salazar and Rosario Iturzaeta as having died of “crib death.” Relatives had not known that the child was born, and the closed coffin meant they had not seen the body. These disclosures did not establish that the infant remains and Lucía’s murder shared a perpetrator or cause; they showed instead how the investigation’s recurring evidence of severed arms could open distinct lines of inquiry, one into a modern killing and another into a concealed family loss.