Policía Nacional

Policía Nacional is the national police force whose investigation of a wife’s murder in the Logroño wife-murder case becomes a crucial source of evidence in a wider inquiry. Though that case was officially closed, details recovered through its officers connected it to the murder of Johana Márquez and suggested that the missing arms and the word “TARTTALO” were not coincidental features of two unrelated crimes.

Casework and the Limits of Jurisdiction

The case concerned a man who had murdered his wife while they were separating and who was already subject to a restraining order after a previous assault. He pushed her against a wall, stabbed her twice in the abdomen, and ransacked the apartment as she bled to death. He even heated and ate a plate of beans in the kitchen while she lay dying, then left without closing the door. A neighbor found her. Policía Nacional arrested him two hours later in a nearby bar, drunk and still stained with her blood; he confessed to the murder but denied any part in the amputation of her arm.

The killer later died by suicide in his cell. When Lieutenant Padua traced the case through Policía Nacional, he learned that the man had left the same unusual word on a cell wall that Jasón Medina had used in a note: “TARTTALO,” spelled with two t’s. The match mattered because the two investigations belonged to different police forces and had been treated as separate, concluded cases. The wife-murder case was Policía Nacional’s; the Johana Márquez case fell under the jurisdiction of the Guardia Civil, and Medina’s death had left that investigation officially closed as well. The repeated post-mortem removal of an arm, coupled with the same uncommon inscription, gave the investigators reason to question whether the cases were connected.

Cross-Case Evidence and Institutional Gaps

The forensic comparison strengthened the case for examining the murders together, but did not by itself establish who had removed the arms. Doctor San Martín found that the cuts appeared to follow the same technique and had been made by a right-handed person with comparable confidence and force. Yet the available images showed only stripped adult forearm bones: without the remains and the suspected cutting tool, he could not determine their age or distinguish a surgical amputation from grave desecration, much less make a definitive match. The earlier investigation into Johana Márquez’s murder had not pursued the tool closely because investigators assumed her father was responsible; comparisons with tools from his home and car produced no positive result.

The inquiry also exposed how separate jurisdictions and laboratories constrained comparison. Amaia noted that the Guardia Civil held its own samples and that police leadership could be reluctant to share information; she argued for an independent criminal unit bringing different forces together in a common laboratory. In this case, cooperation depended in part on personal contacts: Lieutenant Padua used his links with Policía Nacional in Logroño to pursue records that were not part of an active, shared investigation.

Those records opened a further line of inquiry into prison psychiatry. The Logroño prisoner had spoken with a psychiatrist, according to a report that named only the psychiatric service and carried an illegible signature. Padua suggested contacting the prison to identify who had treated him. In Pamplona, records showed that both Jasón Medina and Ramón Quiralte had attended therapy, with supervision assigned to the university clinic, which routinely sent someone. Amaia’s suspicion sharpened when she heard that the clinic was involved: the routine paperwork linking prisoners to treatment might also reveal how violent offenders had come within reach of the same institution.

Prison-Therapy Records and the Clinic

The information obtained through Policía Nacional widened the inquiry beyond the matching crime-scene details. A prison report confirmed that the Logroño murderer had spoken with a psychiatrist, but gave no name: the entry identified only the psychiatric service, and its signature was illegible. That record offered a lead without identifying who had treated him. By contrast, in Pamplona the files showed that both Jasón Medina and Ramón Quiralte had attended therapy under the university clinic’s supervision, with staff sent from the clinic.

The contrast directed Amaia toward the clinic and its prison work, but it did not establish that Policía Nacional had uncovered misconduct. In a later discussion, Amaia described prison reports bearing Doctor Sarasola’s signature while leaving the assigned psychiatrist unnamed; a judge characterized the missing information as an irregularity that prison institutions had failed to question. Amaia suspected the clinic’s volunteer work might have helped it identify violent prisoners as prospective patients, a theory she pressed on Doctor Sarasola rather than a finding attributed to the national police. Policía Nacional’s contribution was narrower but consequential: its case information and the Logroño treatment record supplied one strand in an investigation that began with a closed murder case and grew into scrutiny of how prisoners reached psychiatric care.

What the Separate Case Could—and Could Not—Explain

Amaia’s later recollection of Jasón Medina’s account sharpened the difference between the killings and the unexplained removal of an arm. Medina confessed to forcing his daughter, strangling her with his own hands, and sexually assaulting her after death. He said he had gone home to fetch a rope so he could imitate a crime attributed in the press to the basajaun; when he returned to the borda, Johana Márquez’s arm was already missing. He appeared bewildered when questioned about the amputation, and Amaia believed he was telling the truth about that part. His confession therefore explained the murder and its imitation of a reported crime, but not the missing limb.

That gap prompted a further inference: if Medina had acted impulsively and had no plan involving the amputation, someone else must have been present to take the arm at the right moment. The investigators considered that this person had already known Medina, could recognize potential killers, and had followed him. The possibility reframed the repeated amputations not as a shared act by the men who killed the victims, but as a separate intervention across otherwise distinct crimes. Policía Nacional’s closed Logroño case supplied a comparison that helped expose the question; the proposed follower remained an investigative theory, not a conclusion established by that force.