Navarre Institute of Legal Medicine

The Navarre Institute of Legal Medicine is where the investigation’s questions about violent death and severed remains meet the disciplined, sometimes frustrating work of forensic examination. Its role in the story is shown through the autopsies and comparisons carried out by Doctor San Martín and his staff, and through the limits that shape what their findings can establish.

Setting and Forensic Work

At midday, the institute is nearly empty: rain has recently passed, the wet surfaces catch a tentative patch of sun, and the largely vacant parking lot reflects the lunch hour. The quiet is not a measure of the grief outside. Amaia Salazar encounters two relatives waiting for the return of their mother’s body after a violent death. She knows they have nowhere else to go, and avoids naming the autopsy directly, promising instead to call when the examinations are finished. The scene places the institute between bereaved families and the procedures required to investigate a death, with the language of forensic work carrying a weight that a clinical setting cannot remove.

Inside, Doctor San Martín and two assistants are working at a steel counter with information displayed on a computer. The institute has two autopsies scheduled for that day: Lucía Aguirre’s and Ramón Quiralte’s. When asked which to begin with, Amaia chooses Lucía. She dismisses Quiralte’s death as suicide and closes the zipper over his face, then turns to Lucía’s body, whose injuries remain visible despite having been washed. The sequencing matters: Amaia is there not simply to observe the examination, but to pursue a specific connection that could advance the case.

She asks Doctor San Martín to compare the amputation on Lucía’s body with photographs of skeletal remains found in a cave near Elizondo by the Guardia Civil. The cut on Lucía’s arm was made after death, once the heart had stopped and the blood had begun to clot; its clean edge suggests a toothed implement, perhaps an electric carving tool or grinder. Doctor San Martín sees a resemblance to the cut in the Johana Márquez case, where investigators had initially concentrated on the stepfather and had not identified the tool after comparisons with items from his home and car proved inconclusive. The comparison offers a possible link between cases, but resemblance alone cannot establish that the same instrument—or the same person—was involved.

What the Forensic Evidence Could Establish

Doctor San Martín’s comparison of Lucía Aguirre’s amputation with photographs of the Elizondo remains produced a limited but meaningful result. The cuts appeared to follow the same technique, and each had been made by a right-handed person with comparable confidence and force. All were forearm bones. Yet photographs could not establish the age or sex of the people, determine how old the bones were, or distinguish a surgical amputation from the desecration of a grave. San Martín said casts and scans of the bones, together with the instrument used, would be needed for a definitive comparison; without the physical samples, the visual resemblance remained a lead rather than proof of a common perpetrator or tool.

That limitation exposes a broader institutional obstacle in the investigation. The Guardia Civil held the bone samples in its own laboratory and its commanders were reluctant to share them. Amaia Salazar complained that separate police laboratories and guarded access to evidence left investigators working at cross-purposes; she praised Teniente Padua as an officer more concerned with solving crimes than claiming credit. The institute could examine what Amaia had secured, but its conclusions were constrained by evidence held elsewhere.

Other tests at the institute turned an apparently distant fragment into a personal clue. The infant bones were sufficiently well preserved for analysis despite having been burned at one end. Doctor San Martín’s findings placed them around 150 years old, with an error margin of five years, and identified them as those of a male infant at about nine months prenatal development or one month after birth. A routine CODIS check did not match the infant itself; it found a 25 percent familial correspondence with Amaia. Because that result was extraordinary, the commissioner ordered the process repeated discreetly, with the sample sent to laboratories in Zaragoza and San Sebastián after the initial testing at Nasertic. Both produced the same result. The repeated match established a close family connection, but did not, by itself, explain the infant’s identity or the circumstances surrounding the bones.

A separate materials analysis strengthened the physical link between an old instrument and Lucía’s remains. The scalpel sent from Estella Sanatorium was dated to the seventeenth century on the basis of its alloy and the methods used to cast and forge its metal. The metal tooth embedded in a bone of Lucía Aguirre showed the same alloy and forging. This correspondence connected the two metal samples, giving the investigation more than a resemblance between cut marks, while leaving the identity and actions of whoever used the instrument to be established through other evidence.

Examination as a Collaborative Process

The institute’s forensic work unfolds through close, material comparison rather than a single decisive revelation. Doctor San Martín illuminates Lucía Aguirre’s wound with a powerful lamp, centers a magnifier over it, photographs the cut, and studies it at close range. He and Amaia Salazar then place the fresh image beside the photographs of the recovered bones on a lighted viewing panel. San Martín rearranges and overlaps the images, scrutinizing their alignment while his assistants make light-hearted comments about his quiet, rhythmic noises. The scene makes the comparison a shared examination: the conclusion emerges from sustained visual work by the doctor and investigator, not from an instant identification.

Medical Records and Institutional Blind Spots

The investigation also turns from laboratory findings to the older, less orderly evidence preserved in medical records. A file lists three deliveries for Rosario Iturzaeta: Flora’s birth in 1973 and Rosaura’s in 1975, both natural births without complications, followed in 1980 by an uncomplicated natural twin birth. Both girls were recorded as apparently healthy, but neither was named in the entry. The record makes the existence of another daughter documentary fact, while its omissions leave her fate unresolved.

A separate death certificate identifies a newborn daughter of Juan Salazar and Rosario Iturzaeta and gives cot death as the cause. The woman who finds it explains that the term was commonly used for sudden infant death syndrome, then suggests the baby may have been born unwell. The certificate offers an official cause, not an account of what happened: questions about the infant’s condition, a possible intervention, and the circumstances of her death remain open. The distinction between what a form records and what it can establish mirrors the limits of the physical evidence examined by Doctor San Martín.

Family recollections deepen rather than settle the discrepancy. Amaia’s relatives say they did not see the baby because the coffin was closed, and that they did not insist on seeing a dead newborn. One uncle places the deterioration in the relationship with Rosario after the child’s death. Amaia concludes that her mother concealed the birth from the family, that the birth certificate contains irregularities, and that the infant remains found in extraordinary circumstances may belong to her sister; she treats these as reasons for suspicion, not as a completed identification. Together, the files, testimony, and forensic results show how medical institutions can preserve fragments of a life while leaving the decisive story hidden between their entries.