Rosario Salazar

Rosario Salazar is both the source of Amaia Salazar’s earliest terror and a disturbing point of contact with the investigation into the figure signing crimes as TARTTALO. Confined at Santa María de las Nieves for seven years by the time of the investigation, she attacks an orderly; afterward, TARTTALO appears in her handwriting on the wall, written in his blood. The act makes Rosario more than a hidden piece of Amaia’s family history, but the evidence does not establish whether she is the originator of the signature or acting in concert with someone else.

Identity and the childhood fear

Rosario’s illness is part of Amaia’s childhood understanding of her mother, but so is the knowledge that Rosario could control her behavior. Amaia recalls that Rosario kept herself at a distance from the boundary separating her from the girls, crossing it at night, when no one else could see. She would lean over Amaia’s bed and threaten to eat her, making the child’s fear not an occasional eruption witnessed by others but a private, repeated ordeal. The secrecy mattered: Rosario could appear controlled beyond the bedroom and still deliberately provoke her daughter’s terror in the dark.

When Doctor Sarasola gives voice to a doctrine that evil can cause mental illness rather than merely follow from it, Amaia recognizes something she has believed without naming. She remembers having sensed since childhood that something was wrong in Rosario’s mind, while also understanding that her mother could maintain the distance between them and cross it at night with chilling purpose. Amaia outwardly rejects the doctor’s account, citing human nature and other possible causes of cruelty, but the narration makes clear that this disagreement is a deliberate test of how far he will go, not a simple statement of her private convictions. Rosario’s characterization therefore holds illness and intentional cruelty in uneasy proximity without resolving one into the other.

The hospital attack and the TARTTALO signature

The connection between Rosario and the TARTTALO investigation becomes explicit after she attacks an orderly at Santa María de las Nieves Psychiatric Clinic. The clinic director reports the assault to Amaia, and the attack leaves blood on the bed and its rail. When staff move the bed, they find an inscription concealed behind the headboard: in Rosario’s careful handwriting, using the orderly’s blood, she has written “TARTTALO”. The message is not an incidental mark in an exposed place; it had been hidden from view until the bed was shifted, and its discovery turns an institutional assault into a possible communication from the case’s suspected signature-maker.

The name already carries a distinct criminal meaning. In an earlier investigation, a director described an apparently senseless mark scratched into plaster with a toothbrush handle; although the wall had been painted over, the grooves still made “TARTTALO” legible. The same unusual spelling, with two t’s rather than the more common single-t form, appeared in the Logroño killer’s cell after his suicide. Investigators treated the repeated inscription, together with the matching post-mortem removal of the same arm and the disappearance of the severed limb, as evidence that the crimes might share one directing hand rather than merely imitate one another. Rosario’s blood-written version therefore echoes an established signature, but by itself does not settle whether she originated it, was instructed to write it, or was communicating with the person behind it.

The circumstances of her access to visitors sharpen that uncertainty. The approved list included Flora, Rosaura, Amaia, and a person entered under a first name that Flora vehemently rejected as belonging to any brother of theirs. She regarded the authorization as a scandal and the listed visitor as a stranger who had been allowed inside. Amaia later considers the possibility that the visitor knew Rosario before her court-ordered admission, seven years earlier: since entering the clinic, Rosario had reportedly had contact only with its medical staff and other patients. This narrows the investigators’ thinking toward someone from her earlier life, but it remains a hypothesis, not an identification; the inscription reveals a point of contact between Rosario and the TARTTALO pattern without explaining who brought them together.

The visitor and the wider pattern

Amaia’s reconstruction of the visitor’s access to Rosario extends the significance of the blood-written name without resolving who stood behind it. The visitor list contained four names: Flora, Rosaura, Amaia, and Javier. Flora angrily insisted that no such brother existed and that a stranger had been allowed into the clinic. Amaia reasons that Rosario must have known the visitor before her court-ordered admission seven years earlier, because since then her contacts had reportedly been limited to clinic staff and fellow patients. The disguise, she thinks, was meant to hinder recognition rather than transform the visitor beyond it; an employee or former employee would probably have been recognized. These are investigative deductions, not proof of the visitor’s identity or of Rosario’s role in the crimes.

The place where the bodies were found also pulls Rosario’s history into the investigation, but only as a possibility. Amaia considers whether the unknown visitor knew Rosario from her earlier passage through hospitals, or from before that, in Baztán. The cave’s location might suggest knowledge of the area, yet Amaia recognizes that this clue is weak: summer hikers and publicly available walking routes could lead almost anyone there. The investigation therefore holds two competing possibilities in view—an old connection to Rosario and a location discoverable by chance—rather than treating proximity as proof.

Rosario’s appearance in the case coincides with investigators’ growing distinction between the men who killed their partners and the person who removed the victims’ arms. The husbands displayed familiar signs of domestic violence, including prolonged abuse, addiction, and impulsive cruelty; the identical post-mortem amputation and missing arm were the elements that did not fit. In Jasón Medina’s case, he confessed to killing Johana Márquez but seemed perplexed about the missing arm: after returning for a rope, he found the body already altered. Amaia and her colleagues infer that an unknown offender may have followed him and taken the arm as a trophy. That pattern makes Rosario’s inscription more alarming, but the evidence does not establish that she planned the murders, selected their perpetrators, or knew the full purpose of the signature.

The signature, recruitment, and the limits of attribution

The investigation’s distinction between the husbands’ violence and the repeated removal of the victims’ arms gives Rosario’s inscription a more specific, but still unresolved, place in the case. Jasón Medina confessed to raping Johana Márquez, strangling her, and violating her body after death, yet appeared baffled when asked about the missing arm. He said that after the impulsive killing he went home for a rope, intending to imitate a crime by the basajaun that he had read about in the press; when he returned, the arm was already gone. He had also felt watched, at one point wondering whether Johana’s ghost was following him.

That sequence led investigators to ask how the figure called TARTTALO could have appeared at the scene at precisely the moment needed to take a trophy if Medina had acted without planning. Their proposed answer was that the unknown offender had known Medina and followed him, identifying and recruiting violent men rather than carrying out every murder personally. This theory separates the perpetrators’ familiar patterns of abuse from the repeated, post-mortem removal of the same arm and the signature attached to it. Rosario’s blood-written name places her inside the pattern of communication, but it does not show whether she was recruited, directed, or independently acting; the evidence leaves her connection to the unseen organizer open.