Alicia Solves Three Asylum Murders is the point at which Alice Gould’s close observation becomes a working criminal investigation: she examines the dead, reconstructs how the killings occurred, and persuades officials to test her deductions against the suspects themselves. The sequence makes the mortuary a place of recognition and evidence, where details of wounds and bodies—not merely the authority of the police or hospital—drive the inquiry.

Entry to the Mortuary and Examination of the Dead

After learning that the bodies were kept on the same floor, Alice put on a white coat and approached the police officer guarding the corridor. She claimed to be the new forensic examiner, and he let her pass. Inside, four bodies lay on operating tables. The two ETA members had been killed by cuts to the throat, apparently with a large knife; Rómulo had no visible wounds, a dried thread of blood at his lip, and a body less rigid than those of the two men, suggesting that he had died more recently. Alice touched Rómulo’s face and kissed his forehead before mastering her emotion and looking closely at the other bodies. She also recognized the drowned man as the first person she had seen sleeping on the so-called schizophrenic pillow. The inspection was both personal and analytical: grief did not prevent her from attending to physical differences, and she concluded that she knew who had killed the other three.

Reconstructing the Killings

At the police commissioner’s request, Alice dictated what she had observed and what she inferred. She distinguished the physical evidence from the story she built around it: the two ETA members had been killed with a knife, and Ignacio Urquieta could not have killed them. Her explanation of how they were lured below the hospital turned on a specific deception. Someone who spoke Basque stopped the fugitives, offered help, and led them into the underground maze by promising that an old passage built by the monks would take them beyond the walls. He told them to wait while he fetched a lantern; instead, he returned with a knife. The basement’s labyrinthine layout and the promise of escape made the false guide’s offer plausible enough to draw the men into danger.

The case of Rómulo’s death redirected the inquiry. Alice insisted that the young man had died, provoking disbelief and visible shock, then said she had suspected the killer as soon as she recognized him. She did not present the giant’s guilt as a guess detached from evidence: she asked to see his medical file and the man himself, and requested that Rómulo’s twin be brought in. Her questions shifted the investigation from a reconstruction of the scene to a test of what the suspects could have done and what their own accounts would show.

Alice’s reconstruction of the giant’s attack was grimly physical. She described him carrying Rómulo on his back and repeatedly dropping his own weight onto him, crushing him with the force of a man weighing 160 kilos. The image makes the method intelligible through the giant’s size and strength, while the request to examine him and hear from the twin turns that explanation into a claim the officials can check.

Testing the Reconstruction Against the Witnesses

The officials then put Alicia’s account to the people she had asked to see. Rómulo’s twin had blood beneath his fingernails and said that he had fled because he was terrified after seeing the fat man kill a child. The physical trace and the boy’s explanation supported the distinction Alicia had drawn between what he witnessed and what he did not do.

Norberto Machimbarrena, the giant, also bore telling signs: blood, saliva, and excrement marked the back of his trousers. Believing he was speaking to his superiors in Naval Intelligence, he recounted the events as Alicia had reconstructed them. His delusion did not make him a reliable witness in the ordinary sense, but his account, together with the physical evidence and the medical histories read by the officials, confirmed the explanation. The cases were declared solved.

The commissioner stood to see Alicia off, thanked her for the information, and warmly congratulated her as a professional policewoman. His recognition gave the investigation an official conclusion: what had begun with her passing herself off as a forensic examiner ended with the authorities accepting her deductions and verifying them against the men involved. Alicia was radiant—not simply because she had solved the deaths, but because the success of her inquiry had finally been acknowledged by the officials whose judgment had kept her confined.

Evidence, Credibility, and the Limits of Eyewitness Knowledge

The inquiry also turns on a distinction between seeing a crime and reconstructing it. When asked whether she had witnessed the events she described, Alice did not answer directly. Instead, she had to make her account testable: the officials summoned the people she had requested, examined physical traces, and consulted their medical histories. The twin’s bloodied fingernails and fear-driven explanation, alongside Norberto Machimbarrena’s condition and account, supplied checks beyond Alice’s own interpretation. Her refusal to pose as an eyewitness leaves the reconstruction dependent on inference, but the inquiry gives that inference material points against which it can be assessed.

That standard matters because the room does not begin by granting Alice authority. The commissioner had expected a fantastic account from a talkative, disordered woman; as she explained how she had recognized the dead and reasoned from what she saw, his astonishment grew. Montserrat Castell feared for Alice’s prospects, Teodoro Ruipérez began to question his earlier judgments, and César Arellano trusted her powers of observation and intelligence. Their differing responses make the resolution more than a solution to the deaths: it is also a public test of whether Alice’s reasoning can be distinguished from the assumptions officials have made about her.