Marcel Tremond

Marcel Tremond, a French businessman and Yolanda Berrueta’s ex-husband, is a central witness in the investigation into the deaths of their children. He describes himself as a grieving father who tried to build a family and says that a bereavement support group helped him recover. Yolanda, by contrast, presents their marriage as a story of abandonment after the deaths. As Amaia examines the family’s history, the circumstances behind Marcel’s account—and the limits of what it explains—become increasingly important.

Identity and Family Background

Marcel was married to Yolanda, whose family was wealthy and owned the mines at Almandoz. In her account, he wanted to make a fortune of his own despite that wealth, and forming a family mattered greatly to him. She says she had not wanted children and had already ruled out motherhood when they met; she agreed to become pregnant after he insisted that he wanted a family. Their differing accounts make the decision to have children an early point of tension: Marcel describes it as a shared family aspiration, while Yolanda recalls having been persuaded into a life she had not planned.

The couple had twin boys after a difficult pregnancy. Yolanda says she became a devoted mother as soon as she saw them and cared for them well. Marcel also describes her as changing after the twins’ birth: he says that she was remorseful about her conduct during pregnancy, cried and spoke about what she had done, and then devoted herself to the babies. The agreement between their accounts on her later care contrasts with their sharply different explanations of her earlier choices and of what followed the children’s deaths.

Marriage, Pregnancy, and Bereavement

Marcel gives Amaia a detailed account of the pregnancy and the twins’ fragile health. He says Yolanda had resisted having children and that he eventually persuaded her. During the pregnancy, he alleges, she continued drinking and smoking, took tranquilizers, and used slimming pills because she was preoccupied with avoiding weight gain. The boys were born prematurely, underweight, and with immature lungs. According to Marcel, they spent their first two months in hospital before the couple could bring them home, and were later admitted twice for respiratory problems.

He recounts the night the twins died as a sudden emergency. Yolanda, who he says watched them constantly and scarcely slept, noticed that something was wrong. The couple drove the boys to the hospital themselves rather than wait for an ambulance, but the children never regained consciousness. Marcel says they died sixteen minutes apart—the same interval that had separated their births. Yolanda’s description is different in emphasis: she insists that her sons did not suffocate or drown, but died while sleeping. Their competing descriptions preserve the fact of their deaths while exposing how fiercely the parents’ memories and explanations diverge.

Marcel says that after the deaths Yolanda became unable to sleep or eat, left the house at night, and was sometimes found lying on the children’s grave. He portrays her as overwhelmed by grief and no longer responsive to reason. Yolanda herself acknowledges that she became mentally ill after losing the boys, but stresses the pain of the loss and of her husband’s response. She says he left her while she was receiving psychiatric treatment, after she had gained forty kilos and was telling people that the babies were not in their grave. In her telling, he went on to marry another French woman, who was expecting a child; the twins, she says, would have been three years old.

Accounts Given to the Investigation

When Marcel comes to speak with Amaia, he is accompanied by his parents, Lisa Tremond and Jean Tremond. Markina introduces him as Yolanda’s former husband and explains that Marcel and his parents have come voluntarily to share information about her behavior. Marcel’s testimony thus arrives in a formal setting and with his parents present, a family account offered in response to an active investigation rather than a private recollection.

His description of Yolanda’s earlier life is markedly judgmental. He calls her delicate and recalls her as spoiled and capricious, with parties, alcohol, and drugs contributing to behavior her parents excused as rebelliousness. He presents her resistance to motherhood as part of that history, then describes the twins’ birth as a turning point when remorse and care replaced her earlier conduct. This account gives investigators a chronology of pregnancy, premature birth, medical vulnerability, and bereavement, but it is also Marcel’s characterization of his former wife; the narrative sets it beside Yolanda’s own account rather than treating it as an uncontested diagnosis.

A later disclosure substantially alters the family history. Yolanda’s mother tells Amaia that, a year before the twins were born, Yolanda had given birth to a healthy baby girl, Haizea, who died at two weeks old in the house. She identifies that first death as the cause of Yolanda’s depression. In her view, Marcel pressed for another pregnancy before Yolanda was ready, despite doctors’ recommendations against it, believing that another child would help her forget the loss. Yolanda’s mother says that during the pregnancy Yolanda neglected herself and seemed indifferent, but appeared to revive when she held the twins. The revelation that the boys were not Yolanda’s first children, and that all three had died, makes the earlier account of the twins’ arrival incomplete and places Marcel’s insistence on a family in a more troubling light.

The House in Baztán and the Support Group

Yolanda followed Marcel and photographed his car outside the home of Los Martínez Bayón in Baztán. She brought Amaia printed photographs, including one in which the property’s metal mailbox could be seen, and said she had taken more images before people began parking inside the estate. The photographs establish repeated visits to the house, but do not by themselves explain their purpose. When Iriarte notes that both Marcel and the property owners were businesspeople, he suggests that business might account for the meetings.

Marcel confirms that he went to the house and offers a different explanation: the gatherings were a grief support group led by Berasategui, a psychiatrist later accused of several crimes. Marcel says he and the others were shocked by the seriousness of the accusations, but maintains that Berasategui had led support groups in a personal capacity and had behaved impeccably in theirs. He says that he, the owners of the house, and the other attendees had all lost daughters when they were very young. The group, he explains, helped him pass through stages of mourning and look toward the future after he had spent himself caring for Yolanda and felt that his own grief had been set aside.

Marcel’s testimony therefore supplies an ordinary, sympathetic explanation for the gatherings that drew Amaia’s attention: bereaved parents meeting for support. Yet the house’s connection to Berasategui and the wider investigation gives those meetings a second significance that Marcel’s reassurance cannot settle. The photographs show where he went; his account explains why he says he went there. Neither fact alone resolves what the meetings meant or how they relate to the deaths under investigation.

The Tomb and the Limits of His Account

The dispute over the children’s burial place gives Marcel’s actions a further consequence. Yolanda had told people that the babies were not in their grave, but Marcel’s account of her distress presented that belief as part of her collapse after bereavement. Later, Amaia learns from Yolanda’s father and the undertaker who handled the wake and transfer to the cemetery at Ainhoa that Haizea’s body had not been cremated and was placed in her coffin. The question of what remained in the family tomb could not be answered simply by repeating Marcel’s story about the twins or Yolanda’s grief.

Amaia also learns that after the family tomb was damaged, Marcel arranged for its stone slab to be replaced the next morning. According to the priest at Our Lady of the Assumption, the Tremond family were so distressed that they would not allow the gravedigger to enter, remove the rubble, or raise the overturned coffins; they ordered the tomb closed immediately. That rapid closure left Amaia without a direct way to verify her suspicions: she expected that a renewed inspection would not be authorized, and Marcel’s actions had already made examination more difficult.

Marcel is consequently more than a source of family background. His descriptions convey the real grief he says he endured and the support he says he received, while his decisions about having another child, his visits to the Baztán house, and the prompt sealing of the damaged tomb become part of a larger pattern Amaia is trying to understand. The new evidence does not by itself establish his guilt or prove what happened to the children’s remains. It does, however, prevent his account from closing the case: each explanation—family, bereavement group, and burial—opens onto facts that his testimony alone cannot resolve.