Machimbarrena Lures and Kills Two ETA Members in the Basement

Machimbarrena Lures and Kills Two ETA Members in the Basement is the episode in which Norberto Machimbarrena turns the asylum’s underground passages into a killing ground. The two ETA patients are found dead in the cellars of the former Carthusian monastery, and Alice Gould reconstructs how Machimbarrena used a promise of escape to bring them within reach of a knife.

Background and Discovery

The murders draw force from the convergence of Machimbarrena’s delusion and his practical familiarity with the building. A Navy machinist, he lived in private quarters equipped with a kitchen and volunteered to repair machinery and boilers in the cellars. His work gave him knowledge of the underground spaces; his illness gave those spaces a purpose. He believed he was at the hospital to watch for Basque separatists, and, according to the account of his case, had been committed more than forty years earlier after killing three Basque separatists with a knife.

The two ETA patients were discovered dead in the basement of the former monastery, their throats cut. Alice’s explanation establishes that they had not set out to meet their killer: Machimbarrena stopped them, spoke Basque, and offered to help them escape through a supposed secret passage once used by the monks. He led them into the cellar maze and asked them to wait while he went for a lantern. Instead, he returned with a knife. The deception made his familiarity with the basement operational: what sounded like assistance became a means of isolating the men where he could attack them.

Clinical Explanation and Verification

At the police hearing, the reconstruction was matched against Machimbarrena’s clinical history. Teodoro Ruipérez explained the patient’s fixation on killing Basque separatists, making clear that the killings followed an established delusional pattern rather than an improvised quarrel. Machimbarrena had understood his presence in the hospital as a mission to identify and eliminate separatists; when two ETA patients appeared, that belief supplied its own warrant for violence. His knowledge of the cellars and access to a kitchen knife provided the practical means. The hearing thus joined motive, opportunity, and method without treating the promise of escape as anything more than a lure.

The same examination also tested Alice Gould’s separate reconstruction of another death. Rómulo had blood beneath his fingernails and said he had fled in terror after seeing a fat man kill a child. The Elephant Man, whose trousers were stained with blood, saliva, and excrement, described events while believing he was addressing his superiors in Naval Intelligence; his account matched the sequence Alice had imagined. The testimony concerned a different case, not the killing of the ETA patients, but its confirmation helped the police resolve the cases before them. Alice’s account of Machimbarrena’s crime therefore emerged within a broader inquiry in which testimony had to be read alongside the patients’ delusions and medical records.

The Open Regime and Its Limits

Montserrat Castell’s account of the hospital’s open regime sets the murders within an institution that permitted considerable movement rather than constant confinement. Patients could circulate through the building and grounds, gather in the bar, play cards or dominoes, walk in the garden or wooded area, attend occupational therapy, and work in workshops whose products were sold; some even traveled by bus to nearby towns. This freedom was qualified by numerous exceptions, but it made the hospital’s space a lived environment of movement and access, not simply a locked ward. In that setting, the basement maze and Machimbarrena’s access to it expose how the same institution could offer patients latitude while remaining vulnerable to the knowledge and purposes of an individual resident.

The debate over reform sharpens the contrast without making the open regime a simple cause of the crime. César Arellano defended the constructive legacy of antipsychiatric criticism of older hospital systems, including the removal of bars that made confinement oppressive, but argued that such measures required the infrastructure to support them. The murders belong to this tension between freedom and protection: the hospital’s humane ambitions do not erase the risks embedded in its spaces, while the violence does not by itself settle the case against openness. Its significance lies in showing that institutional reform depends not only on removing visible barriers but also on confronting the less visible vulnerabilities that remain.

The Clue of the Knife

At the inquiry, the knife’s scarcity becomes a constraint in Alice’s reasoning: the relevant exception is a patient living in private quarters with a fully equipped kitchen. She combines that access with two further identifying details—fluency in Basque and a history, more than forty years earlier, of killing three Basque separatists with a knife. The convergence points to Machimbarrena, rather than merely to a patient who knew the cellars or shared his delusion. His volunteer work repairing machinery and boilers below the hospital independently explains how he could guide the two men through the underground maze. Together, these clues turn the murder from an unexplained discovery into a crime whose weapon, location, and target selection all connect to the same resident.