The Elephant Man’s Fatal Misidentification of Remo is solved through a distinction almost everyone at the hospital overlooked: the dead twin was Remo, not Rómulo. Alice Gould’s identification transforms the case from a baffling killing into a reconstruction of how the Elephant Man mistook one brother for the other—and why that mistake proved fatal.

Identifying Remo

When Alice announced that Remo had died, her claim startled those present. Montserrat Castell was especially taken aback: she had not known Remo was dead, and Alice’s appeal to her as a witness seemed at first to put their friendship at odds with the facts. But Alice explained that the brothers were so alike that doctors and patients usually distinguished them by temperament. Rómulo was agile, noisy, and constantly active; Remo was peaceful and solitary.

Alice then supplied a less familiar identifying mark. Rómulo had a small, pea-sized swelling on the outer part of his right ear, while Remo had none. She noted that her own ear had a similar feature. Montserrat confirmed the distinction, giving Alice’s identification a witness at the very moment her disclosure had unsettled the room. The detail mattered beyond naming the victim: as Alice reasoned, the Elephant Man could have caught the slower, unsuspecting Remo, whereas the agile Rómulo would have been much harder for him to seize.

Reconstructing the Killing

Alice’s account turned on what each twin would have done in the Elephant Man’s presence. Rómulo was extraordinarily agile and, once alerted, would keep behind the giant on the return from the outing. Remo, by contrast, had no reason to flee from him. Alice proposed that the Elephant Man suddenly saw Remo beside him, took him for his brother, and attacked. The brothers’ resemblance made the mistake possible; their different temperaments made the fatal encounter possible in a way it would not have been with Rómulo.

The killing, as Alice reconstructed it, relied on the giant’s weight rather than a weapon. He hoisted Remo onto his back, then let himself fall on him, repeating the movement until his 160 kilograms crushed him. The method explained why Remo’s body had been so brutally damaged and why the Elephant Man’s build mattered to the case: the same clumsiness that made him unlikely to catch the fleet Rómulo became lethal once he mistook the more solitary Remo for his twin.

Alice pointed to traces that could test this reconstruction. The Elephant Man had scratches and bites on his back, consistent with Rómulo attacking him from behind; grass caught on the back of his clothes suggested repeated falls, and the dead man’s blood stained his trousers. Unless Rómulo had been bathed and cleaned, Alice added, his fingernails should hold bloodied skin from the killer’s face and ears. Her explanation was not presented as an eyewitness account: when the commissioner asked whether she had seen the events herself, she did not answer directly. Instead, the physical details offered a way to check her inference.

The subsequent questioning supplied that check. Rómulo had blood beneath his nails and said he had fled in fear after seeing the fat man kill a child. Norberto Machimbarrena, known as the Elephant Man, had blood, saliva, and excrement on the seat of his trousers. Believing he was speaking to his superiors in Naval Intelligence, he described the events in a way that matched Alice’s reconstruction. The bodily traces and the two men’s accounts thus converged on the fatal misidentification: Remo had been mistaken for Rómulo and killed by the giant.

The Deduction Changes the Room

The case also becomes a test of whether Alice Gould’s reasoning will be heard as evidence or dismissed as delusion. The commissioner had expected a fantastic account from a woman he regarded as excessively talkative; instead, her identification of Remo and the deductions that followed left him increasingly astonished. Teodoro Ruipérez began to doubt his first judgments of her, while César Arellano trusted her powers of observation and intelligence enough to believe she was telling the truth. Montserrat, still shaken by the revelation of Remo’s death, could only pray that Alice would come through the questioning safely.

That change in the listeners’ attitudes gives the solution a significance beyond identifying the killer. Alice’s account is not accepted merely because she states it confidently: the inquiry tests it against the brothers’ distinguishing feature, the physical traces, and the men’s statements. When those lines of evidence converge, the cases are declared solved. The episode thus makes Alice’s precision visible to the people judging her, while leaving intact the tension between her evident competence and the institution’s prior assumptions about her.

Closure of the Inquiry

After Rómulo and Norberto Machimbarrena had been questioned, the inquiry briefly reviewed the medical histories of both men before declaring the cases solved. The closing sequence places those records beside testimony and physical evidence, making the resolution an institutional finding rather than an inference left solely in Alice’s hands.