The revocation of the order to inspect the Trémouin Family Tomb halted an examination that might have tested Yolanda Berrueta’s insistence that her children’s bodies were missing. It came at the instant the cemetery crew began raising the heavy slab, leaving the question unresolved and turning an already painful search into a confrontation over jurisdiction and the limits of Amaia Salazar’s authority.

The question behind the inspection

Yolanda had repeatedly come to the priest to say that her children were not in their grave. She believed that someone had taken their bodies, and that her instinct as their mother told her they were absent. The priest understood the force of her grief but could not confirm her suspicion: he had conducted the funeral and said he had watched the coffins being lowered into the grave. His testimony offered an account of the burial, not a present-day inspection of what the coffins contained.

The authorization was deliberately narrow. Jueza De Gouvenain limited it to removing the slab, descending into the tomb, and opening only the children’s coffins to check that their bodies were inside. The bodies could not be brought to the surface or handled. Yolanda was permitted to look down from above and see for herself whether they were where they should be. The order therefore offered a way to test her claim without authorizing a full forensic examination.

The inspection begins

Rain had returned after a brief lull. Yolanda waited beneath the church’s small entrance porch with the priest, who held her as she leaned against his shoulder. Gendarmes and municipal officials were present to ensure that the limits of the order were observed. The wet stone, moss, and lichens darkened the cemetery; the weather also kept potential onlookers indoors.

Even before the coffins could be reached, the work became slow and delicate. Officials removed the many flowers covering the tomb and found the slab in such poor condition that they feared it would break if slid aside. They called for a small hydraulic crane instead. After the equipment arrived, workers spent another quarter of an hour setting its supports on the cemetery’s uneven ground. They passed lifting straps beneath the slab and began to raise it slowly.

Revocation and confrontation

The chief of the gendarmes received a telephone call while the slab was being lifted and ran towards the workers, ordering them to stop. He then told Amaia that Jueza De Gouvenain had revoked the authorization and directed that the slab be put back. Amaia was taken to speak with the judge, who demanded to know why an unnamed Spanish judge had called to say that he handled the case and had explicitly refused permission to open children’s graves. The call had placed Jueza De Gouvenain in the position of having to apologize to her colleague; she reproached Amaia for exceeding the limits of her authority.

Amaia answered that the Spanish judge’s refusal concerned another case, which at that point had no apparent connection to this matter. The interruption came before the permitted inspection could establish whether the children were in their coffins. The crew had begun the most consequential part of the operation, but no finding about the contents of the tomb was made during the attempt.

Consequences and significance

The halted inspection did not settle the dispute between Yolanda’s certainty and the priest’s memory of the funeral. Later, Yolanda acknowledged that fear and medication had confused her about the coffins, but maintained that she had been right about the missing baby’s body. She also recognized the cost of the stopped inspection: had she been able to verify that her children were there, the child’s absence might have remained undiscovered, and another bereaved mother might not have been believed. The reversal thus obstructed one immediate check while leaving open a larger question about missing infant remains.

That distinction matters in a case where the investigative account connects the use of children’s bodies to ritual beliefs. A witness describes children under two as being considered in transition between worlds and therefore suitable as a spiritual medium; another describes an offering that required a girl under two who had not been baptized. These are the group’s beliefs, not independently established supernatural facts, but they give the suspected removal of a child’s body grave significance within the investigation. By preventing the inspection, the revocation preserved uncertainty at precisely the point where a physical check might have clarified what had happened.