Esparza Attempts to Take His Daughter's Body

Valentín Esparza’s attempt to take his infant daughter’s body from the funeral home begins as a family tragedy and becomes a source of criminal suspicion. A grandmother’s concern about a mark on the baby’s forehead leads Inspector Iriarte and Amaia Salazar to examine the child; they find evidence of pressure against her skin, and Esparza is caught carrying her body away. His explanations do not resolve why he took her or what he meant by needing to finish. Later, three sugar packets hidden in the coffin and Esparza’s reference to other sacrifices deepen the unease without establishing a definitive motive.

Background and the grandmother’s suspicion

The baby had been born prematurely, with immature lungs, and spent two of her four months in hospital. She had recently been seen by a pediatrician for a minor cold. On those facts, the doctor had regarded sudden infant death syndrome as an unequivocal explanation. The grandmother, however, remained troubled by a small, button-like mark on the child’s forehead. When she raised it with her son-in-law, he ordered the coffin closed.

The grandmother’s grief was unmistakable: she had been caring for the baby for the first time, and the child was the family’s first granddaughter. At first, the account of her distress could be understood as a search for an explanation in the face of a death that was difficult to accept. But she returned to the police station and insisted on the mark. Iriarte accompanied her to the funeral home, where he encountered Esparza leaving with a backpack. The way Esparza held it struck him as wrong; when he saw the inspector, he went pale and ran.

The body in the backpack

Iriarte caught Esparza near his car. Esparza shouted that they should leave him alone and that he had to finish it. Iriarte initially thought he might be carrying a weapon. Instead, the backpack held the baby’s body. At the scene, Iriarte opened the bag under his umbrella, using it as a screen from the rain. The child’s pale face and slightly parted lips briefly gave the still body a deceptive appearance of life. Forensic Doctor San Martín then examined her.

Makeup had been applied clumsily over the bridge of the baby’s nose. San Martín removed it with a cotton swab and identified a pressure mark, likely caused by an object pressed forcefully against the skin when the child stopped breathing. Once the lividity had settled, the mark was visible without difficulty. This finding changed the meaning of the grandmother’s persistence: the mark was not simply a detail she had attached to her grief, but physical evidence requiring further investigation.

Esparza’s explanations and insistence

When Amaia Salazar questioned him, Esparza said he was taking his daughter’s body. The distinction between calling her a body and calling her a child caught Amaia’s attention; she also realized she did not know the baby’s name. Asked where he was going, he said he was going nowhere and only wanted to have her a little longer. He did not provide a destination when Amaia pressed him about being stopped beside his car.

Amaia confronted him with the concealed forehead mark and the makeup, and suggested that he had ordered the coffin closed to prevent anyone from seeing it. She also raised the possibility that he had taken the body to keep his wife from asking questions, since someone had seen the couple arguing at the funeral home. Esparza answered that he had wanted to cremate the body. The exchange leaves the practical explanation unsettled: he described the body as something he needed to take, but his statements did not establish whether cremation, concealment, grief, or another purpose drove him.

His insistence that the baby must not be cremated made the uncertainty more pronounced. After being told that the family would decide what happened following the autopsy, he repeated that she must not be cremated and added that he had to finish. Amaia recognized this as echoing Iriarte’s account of Esparza saying he needed to finish when he was caught. Neither statement clarifies what he believed remained unfinished. The repetition, rather than an explanation, becomes the disturbing feature of his account.

The coffin and the unresolved implications

At a later case review, Amaia identified three unresolved details: the nauseating trail associated with the Osito polar, Esparza’s fixation on preventing cremation, and his reference to other sacrifices. Iriarte also reported a detail discovered after the initial commotion at the funeral home. Inside the coffin, Esparza had placed three packets of sugar beneath a white towel. They were arranged to resemble the coffin’s padded base and, the funeral-home attendant believed, to prevent anyone lifting the coffin from noticing a difference in its weight.

The packets do not explain why Esparza took his daughter’s body, and the investigators do not establish what he intended to do with it. Nor does the reference to other sacrifices, by itself, prove that the child’s death was part of a ritual. The case review explicitly leaves open whether the odor’s third trace might lead to another person. Esparza’s apparent effort to conceal the weight of the coffin, the altered appearance of the baby’s face, and his unresolved language about finishing all make the episode more than a straightforward act of bereavement, while preserving the distinction between suspicious evidence and a settled conclusion. The event thus links a death first attributed to natural causes with questions that the investigation cannot yet answer.