Instituto de Medicina Legal

The Instituto de Medicina Legal is the forensic institution whose autopsy findings and records become a key resource in Amaia Salazar’s investigation of suspicious infant deaths. Its work supplies both the medical classifications that initially close cases and the details that allow those classifications to be questioned.

Forensic role and infant-death records

The institute’s forensic doctor San Martín examines the Esparza child and reports evidence consistent with suffocation: a pressure mark, white fibers matching a soft toy, and saliva traces, including one whose source remains unresolved. The case shows how an autopsy can distinguish a presumed cause from physical evidence, while leaving some findings open to further analysis. In reviewing earlier infant deaths, Amaia learns that sudden infant death syndrome is an exclusionary diagnosis: it applies when an autopsy finds no other cause. The records show that seventeen children in Navarra received that classification over five years, four of them in Baztán; two cases also prompted social-services investigations, though the files record no lasting developments.

Retrospective review and procedural limits

When Amaia asks San Martín about earlier infant-death cases, he identifies Maite Hernández as the Instituto de Medicina Legal’s other titular five years earlier. He says Hernández handled the relevant autopsies because he generally avoided examining very young children, a reluctance he regarded as natural rather than professionally disqualifying. He offers to contact her, and she recalls two cases involving apparently healthy girls: the autopsies were normal, and neither showed evidence that the deaths were unnatural. One baby had slept face down; the other had not. What unsettled Hernández was the parents’ behavior, not a finding in the bodies.

In one case, the father nearly threatened Hernández over whether his daughter’s organs would remain inside her after the autopsy. He spoke of the black-market value of a dead child’s organs and clarified that he meant the market in corpses, not organ donation. The recollection illustrates how the institute’s medical examination could establish no alternative cause while conduct surrounding a death still raised questions. Yet the subsequent records offer little resolution: the cases were closed without incident, and one family received social-services help briefly before giving it up. Elsewhere, the usual expectation of autopsy is explicitly disputed when Lisa Tremond, a hospital pediatrician who had treated the children from birth, says she declined to perform one after Yolanda asked that her children’s suffering not be compounded; Tremond attributes their deaths to a pulmonary deficiency present from birth. The contrast leaves medical procedure, family distress, and the limits of retrospective scrutiny in tension, without making any one of them proof of wrongdoing.

The unresolved saliva sample

A later analysis of the Esparza child’s face and soft toy sharpened one clue without identifying its source. Forensic Doctor San Martín reported that the third fluid sample resembled saliva and was probably saliva, but its unusually high bacterial content produced the toy’s foul odor; the sample was not human. He could not identify an animal source and offered the saliva of a Komodo dragon only as a possibility, explicitly acknowledging the limits of his zoological expertise. The result therefore complicated the forensic picture rather than closing it: the sample was anomalous, but its origin remained unestablished.

Records as the beginning of a pattern

As Amaia Salazar broadens the inquiry, the Institute’s routine classifications become a point of comparison rather than a conclusion: she sets her twin sister’s death alongside three other cases of girls under two, each initially recorded as sudden infant death after routine examination. In several, the parents’ conduct had prompted enough concern for social services to recommend follow-up, while the families shared a connection to the house at Orabidea and the group associated with it. The records help Amaia see a pattern across cases that had been treated separately, but they do not by themselves establish what happened or prove the families’ connection was criminal. Their importance lies in the discrepancy they preserve between a medical label that closed a file and circumstances that later made the deaths newly legible.