The murder of García del Olmo’s father is the unsolved crime that brings Alice Gould into the asylum under the belief that she is investigating a case. Its apparent lack of motive, the suspicion directed at the victim’s son, and the anonymous accusations sent to him turn a brutal killing into an inquiry about evidence, trust, and the dangers of mistaking suspicion for proof.

Background and the killing

The victim was an octogenarian who lived a retired life in his son Raimundo García del Olmo’s home. Raimundo was a physician, and the murder occurred while he was away in Paris attending a professional congress. He discovered his father’s body on returning. Forensic examination placed the killing forty-eight hours before the body was found: three days after Raimundo’s departure and two days before his return.

The violence was extreme, but its purpose was obscure. The old man’s head and chest had been crushed with an instrument difficult to identify, in a manner likened to repeated blows from a large sack filled with sand. Nothing valuable was missing, and neither doors nor windows had been forced. The victim’s age and withdrawn life offered no apparent explanation in jealousy or personal revenge; investigators also discounted financial gain, since Raimundo was the sole heir but was already wealthier than his father. The case thus began with a stark mismatch: a killing of unusual brutality without an evident explanation or ordinary sign of theft.

Suspicion and anonymous accusations

The crime attracted detailed newspaper coverage, but the investigation did not reach a conclusion. In Alice’s account to the hospital doctors, she explains that Raimundo approached her as a client after the case had remained unresolved. Their first conversation about it had taken place at her home, following an evening when Heliodoro Almenara invited Raimundo to dinner. Raimundo came punctually to Alice’s office the following Monday.

His first startling disclosure was that the police suspected him. About a month after he reported the murder and gave his statement, he was summoned back to the police station. The concern had not passed: Raimundo later learned that police were checking with Spanish and foreign colleagues whether the professional steps he said he had taken during his Paris trip were accurate. That verification suggested that the inquiry was still active and that his account of the journey remained under scrutiny.

Raimundo also brought Alice small-format sheets bearing anonymous messages. Each had a narrow strip cut away with scissors, as though a printed letterhead had been removed. One accused him of killing his father while denying that the writer had done so. Alice reports the accusation rather than endorsing it: the letter supplies no proof, but its wording makes the sender’s identity and purpose part of the mystery. Raimundo asks her to determine who is writing, from where, and why. The question of his lost passport also enters their discussion; Alice proposes checking whether anyone used it to travel to Madrid.

Alice’s investigation

The murder is more than background to Alice’s admission: she tells the doctors that Raimundo is the client for whom she came to the institution. To investigate who might have been away from the hospital on the relevant dates, she asked the director for access to the records of selected residents. She needed to learn which had permission to leave the premises when García del Olmo’s father was killed. Her opportunity to inspect one of the records came only when the police commissioner requested it for the meeting.

That method gives the inquiry a concrete, testable direction. Instead of treating the son’s apparent opportunity or the letters’ accusations as conclusions, Alice turns to dates, movements, and institutional records. The evidence presented here establishes what she sought to examine, but does not by itself identify the murderer or show how the investigation was ultimately resolved. The case remains described as inconclusive at the point when Alice explains why she is at the asylum.

Narrative significance

The account reaches the reader through Alice’s presentation to the doctors, where a private commission becomes the reason behind her supposed patient identity. The case’s chronology is relayed retrospectively: the killing, Raimundo’s police interviews, the letters, and Alice’s inquiries are assembled as evidence for the panel. This framing makes the unresolved status important. The story does not begin with a settled verdict but with competing claims—a police suspicion, an anonymous accusation, and a client’s insistence that he is innocent—whose reliability must be tested.

The physical details resist an easy solution. There is no forced entry, no missing property, no clear financial incentive, and no known personal feud; the weapon itself is difficult to classify. Meanwhile, the letters imitate certainty without offering substantiation, and the police’s verification of Raimundo’s travel keeps suspicion alive without proving guilt. Alice’s investigation therefore turns on the distinction between accusation and corroboration. The murder’s significance lies both in its unresolved brutality and in the way it draws her into the asylum, where access to records and the movements of its residents may bear on a crime committed beyond its walls.