Garrido Attempts Suicide as Police Enter

Antonio Garrido Attempts Suicide as Police Enter, but the investigators reach him before he dies. Their decision not to wait for reinforcements brings them face to face with a hanging man on the stairs—and makes rescue, rather than arrest or questioning, the immediate priority.

The Entry and Discovery

Fermín Montes warns Jonan Etxaide that they cannot wait for backup: if Garrido is watching the building, he may already have seen them, and Montes believes that a candle he noticed has been extinguished. He expects Garrido to be inside and stresses that keeping him alive matters because the police need to question him. Montes directs Jonan to the first door on the left upstairs.

The swollen wooden door resists them. Montes drives his shoulder into it, forcing it open only a short distance before it catches; he works it wider, and the two men rush up the creaking stairs. A sudden crack from the stairwell makes them turn their flashlights toward the sound: Garrido has fallen through the opening after hanging himself from the railing.

The Attempted Rescue

Montes runs back down the stairs and finds Garrido hanging. He lifts the man by the legs to ease the strain of the rope around his neck, while shouting for Jonan to cut it. Upstairs, Jonan follows the rope to the broken railing. The thick rope has kept Garrido from suffering a broken neck or severed windpipe, but its tension makes the knot impossible to undo by hand. Jonan searches for something to cut it with as Montes calls urgently from below.

With no tool at hand, Jonan draws his weapon and shoots the rope. It snaps under the bullet and drops through the stairwell. At the bottom, Montes is bent over Garrido, trying to free him from the remaining noose. Garrido is still alive: he coughs and groans, making a broken, unpleasant sound. The police have prevented his immediate death, but the scene ends with the practical urgency of rescue rather than questioning; Montes, soaked with Garrido’s urine, tells Jonan to make the call himself.

The Unanswered Connection

The urgency of keeping Garrido alive reaches beyond the immediate rescue: the investigators need to question him about a pattern in which the violence of an individual killer does not explain the removal of a victim’s arm. In Johana Márquez’s case, Jasón Medina confessed to killing her, but was bewildered when asked about the amputation. He said that after killing her impulsively he had gone home for a rope; when he returned, her arm was gone. The gap between Medina’s confessed acts and the missing limb makes the identity and timing of the person who took it central to the investigation.

The investigators’ working theory is that someone had followed Medina and arrived at the scene in time to take the arm as a trophy. That possibility gives the encounter with Garrido its larger investigative weight: he may be able to clarify how a separate actor could exploit a murder that was not planned. His attempted suicide threatens to close off that line of questioning before the investigators can test what he knows. The rescue therefore preserves not only a life but the possibility of distinguishing the confessed killer’s actions from the intervention that links the crime to the wider pattern.

The Signature and the Case for a Single Actor

The need to question Garrido sits within a pattern that is more specific than the similarities between violent domestic crimes. Investigators had identified three cases, and in each the victim’s arm was removed after death; the same arm was taken, and it was never found. The manner of amputation—above the elbow, with a toothed but sharp implement such as an electric knife or jigsaw—made the repeated absence difficult to dismiss as an incidental detail. At first, the investigators considered whether a husband might have cut off his wife’s hand to remove a wedding ring or prevent identification, but those explanations did not fit well when the killing took place in the victim’s own home.

A word scratched into a cell wall sharpened the contrast between the confessed killers and the person investigators believed had taken the arms. Jasón Medina admitted killing Johana Márquez, but was bewildered when asked about the amputation; after he returned to the scene with a rope, the arm was already gone. His impulsive crime did not explain how another person could arrive at precisely the right moment. Investigators reasoned that this person must have been following Medina, and considered the removal of the limb a trophy-taking act rather than part of Medina’s murder. In another case, a wife-killer in custody died by suicide after leaving the same misspelled TARTTALO inscription on a wall. The shared, unusual spelling made the message appear to be an individual signature, not a detail easily copied from press coverage, which had not disclosed the amputation in Johana’s case.

That distinction also mattered because the men who killed the women otherwise matched a familiar profile: they were related to their victims, had abused them over time, and were often associated with alcohol or drugs and impulsive violence. The repeated postmortem removal of the same arm was the element that did not belong to that pattern. The investigators’ effort to keep Garrido alive thus carried a precise investigative stake: they needed the opportunity to test what he knew against a signature that appeared to connect otherwise separate crimes.