Noberto Machinbarrena's delusional mission belief

Norberto Machimbarrena’s delusional mission belief turns an imagined order into lethal action: he believed his superiors had communicated to him “de mente a mente” that he must eliminate Basque separatists. The account stresses the distance between his long reputation as cured and the violence that followed when two ETA patients arrived at the hospital.

The Believed Order

Machimbarrena had entered the hospital four decades earlier after, as the account puts it, scrupulously carrying out the order he thought he had received from his superiors. The phrase “de mente a mente” gives the command a private, mental form: it was experienced as an instruction from above, not described as an ordinary spoken order. His paranoia is identified directly, and the mission belief is tied to the action that brought him into the institution.

Apparent Recovery and Return to Violence

For more than forty years, Machimbarrena had been considered cured. That history makes the later episode a stark reversal rather than a continuous record of acknowledged violence. When two patients described as ETA psychopaths were admitted, neither lasted twenty-four hours: Machimbarrena killed them both. The account places the murders beside his old belief in a duty to eliminate separatists, showing how a conviction once treated as past could again shape deadly conduct.

The Comparison with Alice Gould

Machimbarrena’s history enters a doctors’ discussion of whether Alice Gould should be called homicidal. Samuel Alvar had used the accusation, prompting questions about whether he was sincere or driven by hatred toward a woman unjustly confined so that she could be despoiled. The doctors also recalled that the poisoning attempts attributed to Alice had appeared in an admission recommendation forged by the criminal who swindled her. In this context, Machimbarrena’s history supplies a concrete instance of paranoia followed by killings, while the disputed evidence against Alice warns that an accusation of homicidal conduct cannot be treated as proof.