Jasón Medina’s suicide at the courthouse abruptly halted the trial for the murder of Johana Márquez and turned an apparent act of self-destruction into a clue to a wider pattern of killings. Medina used a cutter that had been hidden for him, and the message found in his jacket connected his death to the name Tarttalo.

The interrupted hearing

The hearing was about to begin when a uniformed police officer hurried into the courtroom, whispered to the secretary, and then spoke with the judge. After consulting the prosecutor and the defense, the judge suspended the session and left without explaining what had happened. Johana’s mother, dressed in mourning and visibly thinner than she had been at her daughter’s funeral, cried out for answers. Her distress sharpened the scene’s central contrast: the trial meant a formal reckoning for Medina, while the news from the courthouse cells had already made that reckoning impossible.

Amaia Salazar was summoned downstairs by Lieutenant Padua. Outside the toilets, officers and a prison official stood pale and shaken. Blood was spreading from beneath the partition between the cubicles; inside, Medina sat on the toilet with his head tilted back and a deep cut across his throat. His shirtfront was soaked with blood. The guard had accompanied him to the bathroom and remained nearby, but, after hearing him cough, entered too late to stop the death.

The cutter had fallen from Medina’s hands into the neighboring toilet. Its presence raised an immediate security question: it was metal, yet it had passed into the courthouse. Padua showed Amaia that tape remained attached to its handle. The evidence suggested that someone else had placed the cutter in the cubicle, probably behind the cistern, where Medina could retrieve it. The suicide was therefore not simply a prisoner’s spontaneous act; the means had been prepared in advance.

The message and its delayed meaning

The clue that changed the meaning of Medina’s death was not a conventional farewell. A white envelope had been taken from his jacket, and its sealed flap opened to reveal a card bearing a single word: Tarttalo. It was addressed to Amaia Salazar. The spare presentation made the word function less as an explanation than as a deliberate signal: Medina’s death had been arranged to deliver it to the investigator.

Months later, Lieutenant Padua revisited the suicide while discussing the investigation with Amaia. A photograph from Medina’s prison cell showed the same name scratched into the wall with the handle of a toothbrush. The prison director had described it as senseless graffiti, and the wall had since been painted over, but the marks remained visible. A closer examination with luminol revealed that Medina had written them in his own blood on the night before the trial.

The physical evidence made the act more deliberate still. Medina’s right index finger was badly eroded, with the nail gone and the skin worn raw, consistent with having been used to write against the wall. He had no toothbrush among his few belongings. The word in the cell and the card delivered at the courthouse thus formed two parts of a message: one left in the prison, the other carried out through a suicide timed for the day his trial was to begin.

Padua connected this pattern to a prisoner in Logroño who had also killed his wife, written the same name on a cell wall, and then died by suicide. In both cases, the spelling was distinctive: Tarttalo appeared with two t’s, although the common form used one. The repeated, unusual inscription made coincidence or casual imitation less persuasive and suggested a shared directing hand behind the separate murderers’ acts.

The crime behind the signature

Medina’s suicide acquired a darker context when Amaia’s account of his interrogation was set beside the evidence about the murder. Medina had confessed to forcing Johana, strangling her with his bare hands, and violating her after her death. He cried throughout the questioning. Yet when asked why Johana’s arm had been cut off, he appeared genuinely perplexed and could not explain how it had happened.

His account placed the amputation outside the sequence of his own actions. After killing Johana impulsively, Medina returned home to fetch a rope, intending to imitate a crime attributed in the press to the basajaun. When he came back to the borda, Johana’s arm was already gone. He had also described feeling watched, and had wondered whether Johana’s ghost was following him. The account left a gap between the killing Medina admitted to and the removal of the limb he could not explain.

The injury was not an incidental detail. Johana’s arm had been amputated from the elbow with a toothed but sharp implement, compared by investigators to an electric carving knife or a jigsaw. In other reviewed cases, the same arm was removed after death and the missing limb was not recovered. Those acts stood apart from the familiar pattern of intimate-partner violence: the perpetrators were related to their victims, had histories of prolonged abuse, and often acted violently under the influence of alcohol or drugs, but the repeated postmortem amputation did not fit their individual crimes.

Amaia and Padua therefore considered the possibility that Medina had not been alone at the borda, despite the killing itself being impulsive. If Medina had made no plan, the appearance of Tarttalo at precisely the moment when a trophy could be taken required another explanation. The proposed one was that Tarttalo had already identified Medina as a murderer through expertise in reading criminal behavior and had followed him, ready to intervene when the opportunity arose. Medina’s unexplained sense of being watched thus echoed the case’s central distinction: he had committed the murder, but the severed arm and the name left behind pointed to a second actor.

Investigation and institutional aftermath

The death did not end with the suspended hearing. About four months later, Lieutenant Padua told Amaia Salazar that the routine investigation had initially produced little to distinguish it from other custodial suicides. The exception came days afterward, when Luis Rodríguez, the prison official who had accompanied Jasón Medina to court, visited Padua in a distressed state and asked him to make clear that a third party had brought the cutter into the courthouse. Rodríguez feared being held responsible: Medina was the second prisoner under his custody to die by suicide.

The earlier case had occurred three years before, when a prisoner hanged himself in his cell overnight. The prison administration had acknowledged that it should have activated its suicide-prevention protocol by assigning him a cellmate. With another death now associated with Rodríguez, he worried about suspension or other sanctions. Padua reassured him, then asked about the earlier prisoner—a question that led him toward the matching wall inscription and brought the two suicides into the same investigation.

That retrospective inquiry changes the courthouse death from a closed episode into a link in a sequence. The official concern initially centered on custody and responsibility: how a metal cutter entered a guarded building, and whether a prison employee would be blamed. But the cutter’s preparation, the message addressed to Amaia, and the earlier prisoner’s matching inscription redirected attention from procedural failure toward an unseen organizer. The hearing’s abrupt suspension therefore marks both a personal and investigative interruption: Medina escaped judgment for Johana Márquez’s murder, while his death supplied the evidence that the case could not be understood as his crime alone.