Discovery That Haizea's Coffin Holds Sugar

The discovery that Haizea Tremond Berrueta’s coffin held sugar rather than ashes transforms an unsettling detail in a family tomb into evidence that a baby’s body is missing. Amaia Salazar reaches the conclusion through photographs preserved by Jonan Etxaide, matching the bag in the coffin to a food package and then establishing whose remains the coffin was supposed to contain. The finding partly confirms Yolanda Berrueta’s insistence that something was wrong with the burial, while revealing that her loss was not the one she had first been trying to prove.

The photographs in Jonan’s archive

Amaia finds the evidence in a cloud backup organized into folders, among them one labeled Ainhoa. The folder holds more than twenty-five photographs of the interior of the tomb containing Yolanda Berrueta and Marcel Tremond’s children. Jonan has photographed details as well as the wider scene: the initials on the twins’ coffins, the small hands visible in one, and the other baby’s blackened face. The sequence shows that he had examined the tomb methodically rather than merely recording it.

His attention settles on a small metal coffin intended to hold ashes. It is overturned and open. Jonan has enlarged the initials on its side, H. T. B., and separately enlarged a visible corner of the plastic bag inside. That corner appears to bear part of a blue-and-red logo. The photographs preserve the comparison that gives the detail its meaning: Jonan assembled images of French food packages, including lentils, salt, flour, and sugar, all in clear bags with similar-colored logos. He placed an enlargement of the bag’s corner beside a one-kilogram bag of sugar; the logos match.

From presumed ashes to a missing child

The comparison changes the bag from an ambiguous container into an ordinary food package. The coffin had been treated as if it contained human ashes, but the photographic evidence indicates that it held sugar instead. The initials connect the small coffin to Haizea, the first daughter of Yolanda Berrueta and Marcel Tremond. Amaia later explains to her colleagues that Haizea was born a year before the twins and died shortly after birth at her maternal grandparents’ home in Oieregi. Her death, like the other infant deaths under investigation, had been attributed to sudden infant death syndrome.

The supposed ashes had never been a confirmed cremation: they were a substitute for the child’s body. Yolanda’s father and the funeral director who arranged the wake and transport to the cemetery are prepared to swear that Haizea was not cremated and that her body was placed in the coffin. Their accounts make the sugar more than an oddity in the grave. It indicates that the burial no longer contains the remains that witnesses remember putting there.

A discovery complicated by the tomb’s history

The evidence does not show that the twins’ bodies are missing. Their coffins can be seen in Jonan’s photographs, and Amaia tells the investigators that the twins had been confirmed inside the tomb. The crucial distinction is that the apparent substitution concerns a third, smaller coffin, associated with Haizea. The discovery therefore separates two questions that had become entangled: whether Yolanda’s twin sons were buried where she believed, and whether her first daughter’s body remained in its coffin.

A further inspection is not readily available to settle the matter. Amaia doubts that the judge will authorize reopening the tomb. After the tomb was damaged, Marcel Tremond arranged for its slab to be replaced the following morning. According to the priest of Our Lady of the Assumption, the family would not allow the gravedigger to enter, clear the rubble, or raise the overturned coffins; they ordered the tomb closed immediately. The sealed grave thus preserves the very uncertainty that the photographs expose: they show sugar where ashes were expected, but do not recover Haizea’s body or establish when it disappeared.

Yolanda’s claim reinterpreted

When Amaia later speaks with Yolanda at Hospital Saint Collette, Yolanda acknowledges that medication and confusion led her to mistake the coffins. She accepts that the twins are in the tomb, but says that this would not have revealed what happened to Haizea. If the tomb had been opened earlier and the twins found there, nobody would have noticed that the first daughter was missing; Yolanda would have remained branded as a woman who imagined the loss. She says she was right that someone had taken her baby’s body and now intends to leave the hospital to look for her.

That distinction reshapes the meaning of Yolanda’s distress. Her repeated visits to the priest and her conviction that the children were not in the grave had been treated as signs of a bereaved mother’s delusion. The evidence vindicates her sense of absence, but not her original understanding of which children were missing. The twins are present; Haizea is not. When Amaia apologizes for the error that halted the tomb’s opening, Yolanda answers that the mistaken identification may have kept the more consequential absence hidden and prevented investigators from hearing another mother’s case.

The clue’s wider significance

The sugar package recalls other substituted contents Amaia has encountered: a bag of gravel in her sister’s coffin and bags of sugar used by Valentín Esparza to disguise the empty bottom of his daughter’s coffin. In each instance, a familiar burial container promises the presence of a dead child while its contents undermine that assurance. Jonan’s close comparisons turn a small fragment of packaging into a link among cases and a challenge to what the graves appear to prove.

The discovery does not itself return Haizea’s remains or answer who removed them. Its decisive consequence is evidentiary: it converts an overlooked bag into a reason to take Yolanda’s account seriously and exposes a missing child concealed beneath the assumed certainty of a completed burial. The twins’ presence in the tomb and Haizea’s absence must be held together, rather than allowing confirmation of one to erase the other.