Jasón Medina

Jasón Medina is the confessed murderer of his stepdaughter, Johana Márquez, whose killing becomes an early and unsettling piece of a larger pattern of murders, amputations, and staged signatures. Medina committed the crime impulsively, then tried to disguise it by imitating an earlier Basajaun case; he did not know who removed Johana’s arm or why. His later suicide, and the message associated with it, make him not only a killer but an unwitting link in a deliberate provocation aimed at Amaia Salazar.

Identity and the Murder of Johana Márquez

Medina’s crime begins as an act of immediate desire rather than a planned killing. Johana accompanied him on an errand to take a car to a car wash. On the way, he suddenly decided to rape her. He did not consider the consequences or prepare for what followed; only after the assault, once he had regained his composure, did he begin to improvise a cover-up. He took Johana to a rural outbuilding, where he strangled her with his own hands and later raped her after she was dead.

The details of Medina’s confession distinguish what he did from what happened to Johana’s body afterward. He left the scene to fetch a cord, intending to imitate a murder attributed to the Basajaun that he had read about in the press. When he returned, Johana’s arm was gone. During questioning, he appeared genuinely perplexed about the amputation and even supposed that an animal had bitten her. The missing arm was not part of his plan: the crime had unfolded on impulse, and his attempt to stage it came afterward.

Medina continued to invent explanations as he tried to conceal the murder. After placing the cord, he went home to wait for his wife and act as though nothing had happened. He suggested that Johana had gone away as she sometimes did; days later, while his wife was absent, he hid the girl’s clothes, money, and documents, then claimed that she had returned to collect her belongings. The shifting cover story reflected a plan assembled piece by piece after the killing, not a carefully prepared crime.

His conduct did not fit the profile investigators saw in the other murders under comparison. Those offenders had histories of violence or a tightly contained aggression that could erupt under pressure; Medina had no record of violence, and investigators regarded him as an exception to that pattern. His wife’s suspicions had instead arisen from his viciously intent attention toward Johana and his increasingly excessive control of her schedule, outings, and clothing. His sexual violence was part of the murder, but the broader pattern of intimidation and violence in the other cases did not map neatly onto him.

Suicide and the Tarttalo Message

Medina’s death turns his case into a message directed at Amaia Salazar. On the day he was brought to court, the secretary called his name twice before a police officer interrupted the proceedings. The judge abruptly suspended the session. In the courthouse detention area, Medina had asked to use the bathroom; although handcuffed, he managed to cut his throat. He was found still warm, and the officers could do nothing to save him. The sudden suspension and the bloody scene left the murder case unresolved in court, but the manner of his death opened a second line of inquiry.

Investigators later found that, on the night before the scheduled trial, Medina had used his own blood to write on his prison-cell wall the same word left by a prisoner who had killed himself in Logroño. He had worn away the skin of his right index finger, losing the nail in the process. Luminol revealed the writing after the cell had been occupied by other prisoners. Medina’s suicide at court, rather than in prison, was understood as a deliberate departure from the earlier pattern: he had to carry something to Amaia.

That delivery was a white card bearing a single word: “Tarttalo.” The name refers to a mythological cyclops, and its appearance made Medina’s death look less like an isolated act of despair than a carefully staged signal. Yet it did not undo the evidence of his guilt. Amaia and Lieutenant Padua remained convinced that Medina had raped and murdered Johana and then tried to imitate the Basajaun’s crimes. The question raised by the card was not whether he had killed her, but whether someone else had exploited his crime and suicide to attach them to a wider design.

The later investigation recast Medina as a possible instrument in that design. Amaia connected the message he carried with Ramón Quiralte’s decision to wait until her return from maternity leave before confessing where he had hidden Lucía Aguirre’s body and then taking his own life. The timing and the repeated signature suggested that someone wanted Amaia personally drawn into the cases. Investigators eventually established that Medina, Quiralte, and Antonio Garrido had all received prison therapy from Doctor Berasategui. Medina was therefore both a culpable murderer and one of several offenders whose deaths and repeated markings helped expose an unseen pattern of manipulation.

The Exception That Exposed the Pattern

Medina’s case mattered to the later investigation not because it matched the other murders cleanly, but because it did not. The women in the comparison cases were connected to Baztán by birth, though circumstances had taken them elsewhere; Johana was the exception, the only one living in the valley when she was killed, and she had not been born there. The other killers had records of violence or a pressure-cooker temperament. Medina had neither, and investigators saw his assault as an eruption of sexual impulse rather than the planned expression of that same violent pattern. His case therefore made the shared marks on the victims’ bodies harder to explain as the work of a single type of murderer.

The difference sharpened the question of who had shaped the pattern around Medina. He had confessed to killing Johana, yet his confusion about her missing arm, together with the hurried, improvised nature of his cover-up, separated the murder from the mutilation and its larger symbolic use. Later, investigators placed him alongside Ramón Quiralte and Antonio Garrido: all had received prison therapy connected to Doctor Berasategui, all were dead, and their crimes bore the same signature. From the crime scenes, someone had also taken a trophy, cut with an antique amputation saw obtained from Hospitalenea, where Garrido had hidden. The emerging pattern implicated Medina in a chain of crimes and signs without establishing that he understood the chain or knowingly served its architect.

That distinction defines Medina’s role in the case’s widening frame. He remains responsible for Johana’s rape and murder, while the unexplained amputation and the blood-written signature point beyond his own actions. His individual crime supplies the investigators with both a genuine confession and a misleading appearance of closure: the confession identifies the killer, but the details he cannot explain reveal the presence of another hand.

The Prison-Therapy Connection

The link to Doctor Berasategui emerged through a specific investigative question: whether the Logroño prisoner who had died by suicide had received psychiatric treatment, and whether Medina had been treated in prison. The Logroño file recorded contact with a psychiatric service but did not identify the clinician; in Pamplona, investigators learned that both Medina and Ramón Quiralte had attended therapy, provided through the University Clinic. That trail made the treatment records—not Medina’s confession alone—a route toward the person connecting otherwise distinct offenders.

When confronted with the names of Medina, Quiralte, and Antonio Garrido, Berasategui denied knowing them and said he had spent the morning at the archbishopric. Yet the treatment certificates bore his signature. The later confrontation widened the list to include Fernández and Durán: all were Berasategui’s patients, all had murdered women from Baztán, and all had left the same signature. The records thus placed Medina within a recurring sequence of treatment, murder, and suicide, even though nothing in the evidence established that he knew the larger design behind it.