Attempt to Open the Tremond Twins' Tomb Is Stopped

The attempt to open the Tremond twins’ tomb is stopped at the moment the inspection is about to begin. Although Judge Loraine de Gouvenain had authorized a tightly limited check of the children’s coffins, a challenge over jurisdiction prompts her to revoke the order while workers are raising the slab. The reversal leaves Yolanda Berrueta without the confirmation she had come to seek and Amaia Salazar facing a dispute over which court had authority to permit the inspection.

Scope and safeguards

The order did not authorize a general examination of the tomb. It allowed the gendarmes and officials to remove the covering slab, descend inside, and open only the children’s coffins to establish whether the bodies were still in their boxes. They were not permitted to bring the bodies to the surface or handle them in any way. Yolanda could look down from above and confirm that her children were where they should be. The restrictions made the proposed inspection a verification, not an exhumation or forensic examination.

The narrow terms also shaped the scene’s stakes. Yolanda was present not to direct the work or touch the remains, but to see for herself whether the coffins still contained her children. A priest supported her as she leaned against his shoulder beneath the church entrance’s small portico. He whispered words of comfort while she remained affected but composed. The procedure offered the possibility of an answer while setting strict limits on what could be done to obtain it.

A rain-soaked cemetery

The inspection took place after a brief lull in the rain had ended. The cloud cover had raised the temperature slightly and stilled a bitterly cold breeze, but the rain had darkened the porous stone of the tombs. Moss and lichen gleamed across the family vaults, details Amaia had not noticed on her earlier visit. The weather kept potential onlookers indoors; beneath the entrance to the church of Our Lady of the Assumption, the small group attracted little attention, with only the gendarmes in uniform.

The chief of the gendarmes and two patrols were there to ensure that the order was followed exactly. Municipal officials waited with them, while the workers had to position a crane on the cemetery’s uneven ground. The rain had left deep puddles among the graves, and getting the crane’s supports into place took another quarter of an hour after the workers returned. The delay was practical, but it prolonged the interval between the formal permission and the moment when the coffins might actually be checked.

Jurisdiction challenged

A dark-blue official car arrived beside the cemetery entrance as the chief of the gendarmes’ phone began to ring. An attorney present with a couple insisted that Amaia had no jurisdiction there. The chief rejected the objection by pointing to the written order and offering to read it aloud. After examining the document, the attorney spoke to his clients; they protested angrily, but he escorted them out of the cemetery.

The chief gave the uniformed officers twenty seconds to leave and ordered that anyone who resisted be detained and taken to the police station. From above, Amaia saw the attorney and his clients stop farther down the street, keeping scrupulously to a distance of two hundred metres. Their departure cleared the cemetery for the authorized work, but it did not settle the underlying question of jurisdiction. The written permission remained the basis for proceeding only until the chief received the call that changed the order’s status.

The order revoked

Using a cable-threading tool, the workers passed straps beneath the heavy slab and began to lift it slowly. The chief ran toward them with his phone still at his ear and ordered them to stop. He told Amaia that Judge Loraine de Gouvenain had revoked the authorization and directed the workers to put the slab back. Amaia opened her mouth in disbelief; the order was withdrawn not after the coffins had been inspected, but during the first physical step toward opening the tomb.

De Gouvenain then spoke to Amaia from inside her car, keeping the raised window between them. She was angry that a Spanish judge had called to say that he was handling the case and had explicitly denied permission to open children’s graves. She said the call had left her having to apologize to her colleague because Amaia had crossed a limit. Amaia answered that the Spanish judge’s refusal concerned another case and, as she had already tried to explain, was not initially related to this point. The exchange exposes the gap between Amaia’s understanding of the separate matters and the jurisdictional objection that persuaded De Gouvenain to reverse her decision.

The attempt ends without the children’s coffins being opened and without Yolanda receiving the visual confirmation the limited order had promised. Nothing in the scene establishes what the coffins contain; the inspection’s central question remains unanswered. The abandoned lift makes the reversal concrete: the straps are already beneath the slab, the workers have begun to raise it, and yet the authority to continue has disappeared before the tomb can be entered.