Doctor Berasategui

Doctor Berasategui is a psychiatrist whose two apparent spheres of work—clinical and private psychiatric practice, and leadership of grief-support meetings—become entangled with an investigation into infant deaths and a secretive group in Baztán. Detained in connection with Rosario’s release and the crimes known as the Tarttalo cases, he dies in prison before Amaia Salazar can question him about where he and Rosario went after leaving the clinic. His absence turns his records, associations, and unexplained visits into evidence that must be interpreted without his account.

Identity and Professional Roles

Berasategui is described as an eminent psychiatrist who worked both at a clinic and in private practice. He also led support groups for people grieving the deaths of children. The distinction between those roles matters: people close to the group remember his help as genuine, while the investigation uncovers other associations that make his public reputation an incomplete guide to his activities.

His professional presence intersects with the medical uncertainty surrounding sudden infant death syndrome. In the cases reviewed by Amaia, apparently healthy infants had died in their sleep, and autopsies had failed to establish another cause; in Navarra, seventeen such deaths were recorded over five years, four in Baztán. Two families had also drawn the attention of social services, though the records provided no further account of those inquiries. These facts establish the investigative setting, not a finding that Berasategui caused the deaths.

The Secretive Group and Its Connections

Amaia learns from Elena Ochoa that, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a sect-like group established itself at a farmhouse in Orabidea. It began as a communal gathering with cultural and spiritual interests, then moved toward occult practices, including animal sacrifice and discussion of human sacrifice. Elena eventually left when the rites became too brutal. Rosario had also belonged to a group of this kind, whose beliefs and proposals included sacrificing newborns or very young children.

The farmhouse later became a renovated mansion occupied by a wealthy couple who had belonged to the original group. A neighbor identified Berasategui’s car there on more than one occasion, and the couple admitted knowing him, but they initially declined to explain the nature of their relationship. Their own daughter, they said, had died before the age of two during a trip to the United Kingdom. Amaia’s investigation found no death certificate, hospital record, or evidence of the claimed journey. The absence of documentation deepened suspicion; it did not, on its own, establish what had happened to the child.

Berasategui’s presence at the mansion also connects him to families who had lost infants. Amaia identifies her own mother and three other cases of girls whose deaths had been classified as crib deaths, with the families sharing a connection to the house and group. In reviewing the broader pattern, she notes that social services had recommended follow-up for some families with other children. The connections make Berasategui a significant link in the inquiry, but the evidence presented through these discussions distinguishes suspicious circumstances from a proven account of each death.

Grief Work and Conflicting Testimony

At a meeting with the Martínez Bayón couple, Amaia raises the repeated visits to their Baztán home and Berasategui’s presence there. The husband explains that Berasategui led a bereavement support group attended by people who had lost young daughters, including the couple and the mansion’s owners. He says the group helped him face the stages of grief and look toward a life beyond loss. He also acknowledges that Berasategui had been accused of serious crimes, but maintains that the doctor’s conduct in the support group was exemplary and his help invaluable.

The account complicates any simple reading of the meetings as either innocent or sinister. Their members shared a real bereavement, and at least one participant describes concrete emotional support; at the same time, the meetings joined families whose infant deaths and associations with the old group attracted police scrutiny. The husband’s testimony explains why the participants gathered and what he believed Berasategui offered, without resolving the doctor’s full purpose or the nature of his other relationships.

A separate interrogation concerning the Tremond children brings out another conflict between medical authority and bereavement. Lisa Tremond, head of pediatrics at the hospital where the children died, says they had a congenital pulmonary deficiency and that their deaths were not sudden infant death syndrome. She explains that no autopsy was performed because Yolanda had pleaded that the children not be cut open, and Lisa judged that sparing her further suffering was the right decision. This episode does not identify Berasategui as the cause of the deaths; it shows how grief, clinical judgment, and the handling of infant deaths form part of the wider evidentiary problem surrounding the cases.

Detention, Records, and Death

Amaia needs to ask Berasategui about the interval between his departure from the clinic with Rosario, captured on security cameras, and the later attack on Engrasi’s home in which Ibai was taken. She believes the pair sheltered somewhere along the way, since the father’s house had been ruled out and the night was harsh. With Berasategui dead, she loses the most direct route to an answer about where they went.

Sarasola later tells Amaia that Berasategui kept a meticulous encrypted file at the clinic, covering every case he had handled or treated, both in the clinic and in his private work. The archive included the Esparza case, giving the files potential value beyond the infant-death inquiry. Sarasola says he does not possess them: after Berasategui was detained in connection with Rosario’s release and the Tarttalo crimes, senior Vatican authorities took an interest in the matter. The archive’s scope and encryption suggest an unusually systematic record of his work, while its transfer out of Amaia’s immediate reach makes access to its contents uncertain.

Berasategui’s death in prison prevents Amaia from confronting him with the accumulated questions: his visits to the mansion, his role among bereaved families, his connection to Rosario, and the files he kept. His death is therefore both a plot consequence and an evidentiary rupture. The investigation can connect people, places, and cases around him, but it must proceed through testimony and records rather than a confession or direct explanation from the psychiatrist.

Narrative Significance

Berasategui functions as a point of convergence between institutions and intimate loss: the clinic, psychiatric practice, bereavement groups, a former sectarian meeting place, and families whose children died. The contrast between the documented usefulness of his support group and the disturbing network around the farmhouse resists an easy division between a trustworthy public persona and a wholly legible private one. His encrypted archive gives that ambiguity material form: the case histories exist, but they are coded and, according to Sarasola, no longer in his possession.

The character also helps expose the limits of diagnosis and testimony in the investigation. A death classified as sudden infant death syndrome is an exclusionary medical conclusion, not an explanation of every surrounding circumstance; an absent autopsy, an undocumented journey, a parent’s conduct, or a shared address may prompt further inquiry without independently proving murder. By dying before Amaia can question him, Berasategui remains both a suspected participant in a larger criminal context and an unanswered question at its center.