Yolanda Berrueta’s revelation that her children’s bodies may have been removed from their coffins transforms a mother’s insistence, readily dismissed as a product of grief, into a line of investigation supported by precise claims and photographs. Her account joins two kinds of evidence: what she says she saw in a hospital box, and what she recorded while following her ex-husband. The possibility that the graves are empty changes the meaning of the family’s mourning rituals and gives Amaia Salazar a reason to test Yolanda’s story rather than simply classify it as delusion.

The loss and the accusation

Yolanda first tells Amaia that the people entering the house are not prospective buyers: she is interested in what she believes the killers are doing inside. She accuses them of killing her children and withholding their bodies, leaving her without even a place where she can properly mourn. Her certainty is striking, but Amaia recognizes the seriousness of the accusation and asks whether Yolanda has proof. Yolanda concedes that she did not witness anyone killing the children. Instead, she says her former husband, Marcel Tremond, became involved in the group’s dark offerings and handed the children over; she believes that their bodies were subsequently taken and that the family grave was left empty.

The children had died of sudden infant death syndrome, which Yolanda identifies as cot death. Her account does not claim that they survived: she says they stopped breathing at home and remained in cardiopulmonary arrest on the way to hospital, their faces and fingers turning blue. The distinction matters to the case. She is not proposing that the children were secretly alive, but that their bodies disappeared after their deaths.

Yolanda explains that after the loss she became mentally unwell and does not deny having received psychiatric treatment. She describes the pain of losing the children and her husband’s response as overwhelming her. According to her, Marcel reassured her that everything would be all right, and then the children were taken. He maintained a family mausoleum filled with flowers, she says, but its appearance of care concealed what she believed was an absence: the coffins were empty. She also recalls that she was not allowed to see the children during the wake or funeral. Marcel had the small coffins closed, telling her it would be better to preserve a good memory. For Yolanda, that protection becomes another reason to suspect that something had been hidden from her.

From suspicion to specific evidence

When Yolanda returns to speak with Amaia’s colleagues, her appearance and behavior are carefully recorded alongside her claims. She arrives in a burgundy dress, carrying a cardboard folder marked by the visible traces of her sweaty hands. She holds it protectively against her hip when Amaia offers to take it. Amaia arranges the conversation in an office, introduces her to the others, and tells her that the interview will be recorded. She also cautions her colleagues that Yolanda is in psychiatric treatment and may seem scattered, but has been speaking clearly and sticking to concrete details. The team must check those details, Amaia warns, because a lawyer could use Yolanda’s condition to undermine the case.

Yolanda’s most specific account concerns a metal box at the hospital. Though weak, she says, she managed to enter the room where it was kept and open it. Inside she found a towel wrapped around bags of sugar, not her baby. When she told Marcel, he said that she must have gone into the wrong room. Yolanda admits that tranquilizers had made her doubt her own memory at the time; she now asks why anyone would put bags of sugar in a coffin for a dead child. The oddity of the substitute contents makes her allegation concrete without, by itself, establishing who put them there or why.

She also produces photographs from the folder. They show a vehicle parked outside a wooden fence that Amaia recognizes as belonging to the Martínez Bayón couple’s property; one image clearly shows the metal mailbox. Yolanda identifies the car as Marcel’s and says that the property was where he went. She has printed only some of the photographs, she says, and believes that more may be stored on her memory cards. She stopped obtaining clear images after the visitors began parking inside the estate. Inspector Iriarte points out that Marcel is a businessman and that the property owners are also businesspeople, leaving open the possibility of ordinary business meetings. The photographs establish a visit to investigate, not its purpose; Yolanda’s interpretation still needs corroboration.

The grave, the witnesses, and the doubt

Other people’s accounts complicate the claim without resolving it. A priest who knows the family says Yolanda visits him weekly to insist that the children are not in their grave. He understands the force of a mother’s grief but rejects her conclusion: he officiated at the funeral and says he watched the coffins being lowered into the ground. A neighbor has also reported that Yolanda once tried to open the grave. These accounts confirm the persistence of her conviction and the public history of the burial, but neither establishes what the coffins contained.

The story places Yolanda’s anguish beside another account of infant death. As Amaia walks with Judge Markina, he recalls that his three-week-old brother died when he was twelve. He remembers his mother trying to breathe life into the baby, then enduring hours of cries before retreating into silence and asking only where her child was. She blamed herself, attempted suicide, and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. The parallel does not prove Yolanda’s allegations; it underscores how a parent’s grief can be both devastating and difficult for others to interpret. In Yolanda’s case, the fact that her mental health has suffered creates a reason to scrutinize her claims, but not a substitute for checking them.

Consequences and confirmation

As the inquiry develops, the question of whether to open the grave becomes consequential. Yolanda later acknowledges that she was frightened and confused by medication and may have mixed up the coffins. Yet she also says that if the examination had found her children in the grave, investigators would never have discovered that the girl was missing; people would have continued to regard her as crazy and might not have listened to another bereaved mother from Elizondo. She concludes that her baby’s body was stolen and says that getting out is now her priority so she can search for her. This later statement sharpens the revelation: the suspected absence is no longer only a claim about an empty tomb but part of a wider pattern involving another missing girl.

The event’s force comes from the gap between the visible forms of mourning and the bodies they are meant to contain. Flowers, a funeral, sealed coffins, and a priest’s memory of the burial all appear to certify that the children have been laid to rest. Yolanda’s hospital-box account and photographs unsettle that apparent certainty, while her treatment history makes the people around her hesitate to believe her. The investigation must therefore hold two obligations together: recognize the vulnerability that shapes her testimony and verify its details rather than allowing that vulnerability to erase them.