Norberto Machimbarrena’s killing of two ETA members is recalled as the grim return of a delusion that the hospital had believed cured: after more than forty years in the institution, he killed two newly admitted ETA patients within a day. The episode becomes more than a past act of violence when Samuel Alvar invokes it in discussing Alice Gould, placing the uncertain grounds for her confinement beside a case in which paranoid belief had proved lethal.

Background and the Recalled History

Machimbarrena had been admitted about four decades earlier after acting on what he believed were orders from his superiors, transmitted mind to mind, to eliminate Basque separatists. The account identifies him as paranoid and describes the killing as the execution of a delusional command, not as an independently established political mission. That distinction matters: his belief supplied the purpose he thought he was obeying, while the hospital’s interpretation of his condition supplied the frame through which the earlier and later acts were understood.

For more than forty years, the institution had considered him cured. The length of that interval gives the murders their particular force in the retelling. A judgment maintained across decades did not prevent a sudden return to lethal action when two patients associated with ETA arrived. The account does not describe a gradual warning or a renewed clinical assessment before the killings; it stresses the sharp reversal between presumed recovery and violence.

The Killings and Their Immediate Significance

The two ETA patients had been in the hospital for less than twenty-four hours when Machimbarrena killed them both. Their brief stay is the key measure of the event’s speed: the violence followed their admission almost immediately. The account does not name the victims or supply further details of the killings, but it makes clear that their presence coincided with the reactivation of the very kind of mission that had led to Machimbarrena’s original confinement.

The murders therefore unsettle the reassuring force of the word cured. In Alvar’s retrospective account, a patient could be treated as recovered for decades and still act on a delusional command when circumstances appeared to match it. The episode establishes the seriousness of the hospital’s failure to anticipate what happened, without explaining what assessments or precautions had preceded the deaths.

The Case in the Dispute over Alice Gould

Alvar brings up Machimbarrena while describing Alice as paranoid, using the earlier case as a comparison in a dispute about whether she is dangerous. The comparison is consequential but not conclusive: Machimbarrena’s killings are presented as established events, whereas the alleged attempts by Alice to poison her husband appear in the medical recommendation for her admission. At the doctors’ meeting, the other physicians question Alvar’s use of the charge, noting that the recommendation itself had been falsified by the fraudster who swindled her. The two cases thus occupy different evidentiary ground even as they are placed side by side in argument.

After the ETA killings, Alice also uses the case to manipulate Melitón Deza. She falsely tells him that the director had suggested Deza informed Machimbarrena that the two separatists were present and helped them escape so that the killer would reach them. Deza does not know this allegation, and the narration explicitly identifies Alice’s story as a lie. The episode shows the murders acquiring a second life as a tool in the hospital’s personal and institutional conflicts: their reality is not in doubt, but claims about who enabled them can be invented and circulated.

Narrative and Institutional Significance

The murders are recounted retrospectively rather than staged in the available account. Their force lies in the contrast Alvar draws between prolonged presumed recovery and violence within hours of the two patients’ arrival, and in the way that contrast enters the argument over Alice’s diagnosis and detention. The episode warns against confusing a long-standing clinical judgment with certainty about future conduct; at the same time, the dispute over Alice shows why a grave comparison cannot substitute for reliable evidence about an individual case.