The Logroño wife-murderer’s suicide in prison transformed an apparently closed domestic murder case into a crucial lead in the investigation of killings marked by a missing arm and the same distinctive message. His death, initially treated as an isolated prison incident, exposed a pattern that connected his crime to other murders.

The suicide in prison

The man had been in prison only a few days when he died by hanging in his cell. He had shown no obvious warning signs: he was calm, eating well, sleeping soundly, and appeared to be adjusting to custody. Because he was new to the prison, he had spent several days alone in a cell and had received no visits from family or friends. One night, without any apparent indication of what he intended, he hanged himself.

The cell offered no high projection from which to suspend himself. He carried out the hanging seated on the floor, an act that required sustained effort. A prison officer heard him gasping and raised the alarm; the man was still alive when staff entered, but died before an ambulance arrived. The circumstances made the death more than a routine prison suicide: his apparent calm and the difficulty of what he had done suggested a deliberate, concealed purpose.

The word on the wall

The prison director described the writing as something like a suicide note: the prisoner had scratched it into the plaster with the handle of his toothbrush. The wall had since been painted over, but the grooves remained visible in a photograph taken at an angle. They spelled one legible word: “TARTTALO.” Its exact spelling matched the message Jasón Medina had left for Amaia Salazar, including an extra “t” that was unusual in the word’s common form. What looked like a senseless mark therefore became a link between two men who had killed separately and died in custody.

The comparison mattered because the Logroño wife-murderer’s violence was otherwise conspicuously different from the precise removal of the arm. He had stabbed his estranged wife, left a disorderly scene, and made no effort to conceal his own bloodied traces; the forearm, by contrast, had been removed after death, cleanly at the elbow, with little blood. Neither the severed limb nor the cutting tool was found. Amaia initially allowed that the amputation might have been incidental, but the matching inscription, repeated across cases, made the missing arm and the message look less like the work of each killer than the signature of another person.

That distinction also reshaped the reading of Medina’s crime. He had confessed to raping and strangling Johana Márquez, yet appeared genuinely perplexed when asked about her severed arm. He said that after killing her impulsively he had gone to fetch a rope, intending to imitate a crime he had read about; when he returned, the arm was gone. The timing suggested to the investigators that the person who removed the wife-murderer’s victim’s arm might likewise have acted alongside a killer without being the person who committed the murder. The suicide’s final word thus pointed beyond a resemblance between crimes toward a hidden operator who selected victims’ arms as trophies.

The pattern and its unresolved limits

The connection between the Logroño death and the other murders had gone unnoticed partly because the cases were handled as separate, completed crimes. The killers had confessed, and in at least two cases had denied responsibility for the amputation; once they died by suicide, the files were readily closed. Information also remained divided among different police jurisdictions, while murders of women by their partners received little attention. The shame felt by victims’ families could deepen that silence. The matching detail that might have joined the cases—the removal of an arm—was therefore scattered across records rather than recognized as a shared clue.

The emerging pattern was not that the killers themselves all behaved alike. In the cases Amaia Salazar reviewed, perpetrators were generally relatives or partners of their victims, with histories of violence or violence held in check, often alongside alcoholism or drug use. Johana Márquez complicated that profile: she was the only victim living in the valley when she died, and her stepfather had no known history of violence. His sexual aggression and impulsive killing differed from the other perpetrators’ established pattern. The repeated sign across the cases thus pointed away from a simple likeness among the murderers and toward an additional actor whose intervention could leave the same trace in otherwise different crimes.

The investigation widened when two more women born in the valley were found to have died at the hands of their partners, one in Bilbao and the other in Burgos. Their deaths had appeared in funeral notices in the valley, but the available information did not establish whether either woman had suffered an amputation. They were possible leads, not confirmed additions to the series. The same caution applied to the theory that someone had selected or followed the killers: the investigators reasoned that the person behind the recurring signature might be skilled at recognizing violent men and recruiting them, and that he could have followed the unpredictable Jasón Medina to be present when Johana was killed. It remained an inference, but the prison inscription made the separate suicides part of the evidence rather than the end of the cases.

How the earlier death resurfaced

The prison death returned to view during a separate inquiry into Jasón Medina’s suicide. Luis Rodríguez, the officer who had accompanied Medina to court, approached Teniente Padua worried that he might be held responsible for a second suicide among prisoners in his custody. Three years earlier, the Logroño wife-murderer had hanged himself in his cell; the prison administration had acknowledged that suicide-prevention procedures should have been activated by placing a companion with him. Rodríguez did not know whether the victim’s severed arm had ever been found. Padua’s questions about that earlier case brought the unexplained amputation into the investigation, turning a death previously treated as a closed matter into a route toward recognizing a wider pattern.