The Jonan Etxaide Murder Case turns the investigation Jonan had been pursuing into a crime scene: he is found shot dead at home, and the materials he had collected on the case have been taken. His death devastates Amaia Salazar, his closest friend and colleague, but she responds by treating the murder as an active investigation, even as authority over it passes to another unit.

The Investigation Before the Murder

Before his death, Jonan was working on the connection between several suspicious infant deaths and a group that had operated in Baztán from the late 1970s into the early 1980s. Amaia’s inquiry had traced the group to a house in Orabidea, where Elena Ochoa had once attended meetings with Amaia’s mother. The gatherings had shifted from cultural and spiritual activity toward occult practices, animal sacrifice, and discussion of human sacrifice; Ochoa left when the rites became too savage. The house’s present owners, a wealthy couple who had belonged to the original group, admitted knowing Doctor Berasategui but avoided explaining their relationship with him. A witness had repeatedly seen Berasategui and his car at the property.

Jonan had taken this broader inquiry further. Amaia told colleagues that he had established that Ainara Martínez Bayón, the owners’ daughter, had probably never travelled to the United Kingdom, despite her parents’ account that she had died there. No death certificate, hospital record, autopsy report, or burial record supported the story. The case was not simply about a disputed family history: Amaia connected the house and its group to several infant deaths, including that of her own sister, and noted that the bereaved parents’ conduct had prompted concern from social services. Jonan was still pursuing these links when he was killed.

Discovery and the Murder Scene

Fermín Montes called Amaia with the news: Zabalza had gone to Jonan’s home, found the door ajar, and discovered that Jonan had been shot. Amaia immediately questioned what Zabalza had seen. He had rung the bell without an answer, then knocked; the door, which had seemed shut, gave way under the blows. From the entrance he saw Jonan lying on the floor. Amaia set off at once, with Montes beside her and Iriarte following in another car.

At the apartment, Zabalza tried to keep Amaia outside, pleading with her not to enter. Montes, who had reached the fourth floor, silently backed him up. Amaia stopped struggling only long enough to draw her pistol and press it against Zabalza’s side. When he stepped back, she went in. San Martín was kneeling beside Jonan, whose body lay face-up in a broad pool of blood. He had been shot twice: once in the chest, near the base of the neck, and once in the forehead. The chest wound had bled little; most of the blood had flowed from the exit wound in his back. The second shot had bloodied and matted the hair at the top of his head.

The sight broke through Amaia’s effort to hold herself together. She had entered with her gun still in her hand, scarcely aware of the alarm this caused among the officers. After drawing a deep breath, she could no longer contain her reaction: grief overwhelmed her, and she fell to her knees before Jonan. She recognized him not merely as a colleague but as her best friend and, in her judgment, the finest person she had known. Montes knelt beside her and carefully took the weapon from her hands.

The Targeted Search and the Transfer of the Case

Once her first shock had passed, Amaia demanded an account of what had happened. At least fifteen minutes had elapsed since she entered the apartment, yet no one had briefed her. She acknowledged that the officers were shaken too, but refused to let grief send them home: Jonan had been an exceptionally professional, sensible, and loyal colleague, and his loss was a catastrophe; the immediate task, she insisted, was to find his killer. Zabalza explained that the door had looked closed but was only resting in its frame, and had yielded when he knocked. From the entrance he had seen the body in the living room.

The apartment showed no signs of an ordinary burglary. Amaia rejected that explanation and asked after Jonan’s phone, which had also disappeared. Her calls had gone straight to voicemail; when she tried again, there was no ringing signal, suggesting that the phone was switched off or out of coverage. Inside, the intruder had searched methodically rather than ransacking the rooms. Laptops, cameras, external hard drives, and Jonan’s collection of USB drives were gone. He had used those drives to keep case information and photographs, making the theft of his work materials central to the crime scene: someone had selected the devices that held his investigations, not merely whatever valuables happened to be at hand.

Amaia understood that the investigation might soon be taken from her team. Before that happened, she ordered the officers to photograph everything, even if they had to use their mobile phones, so the scene would be documented. A photograph on a shelf showed her and Jonan in formal police uniforms, alongside pictures of him with his parents and with an unidentified man on a boat. The images sharpened the gap between professional closeness and private knowledge: Jonan had been her best friend, yet she realized she knew little about his personal life. The silver emergency blanket covering his body caught the light as the duty judge arrived with a court clerk.

The transfer followed soon afterward. The commissioner informed Amaia that Group Two of the Pamplona Homicide Unit would take charge. She identified herself as head of Homicide, but the commissioner refused to leave her in command, saying that he could not do so and that she would have made the same decision in his position. Amaia claimed that her phone had no battery. Her authority over the case was removed just as the murder scene made plain that Jonan’s collected evidence might be part of what the killer wanted to suppress.

The Evidence Jonan Left Behind

The murder’s investigative significance extends beyond the removal of Jonan’s equipment: his work had begun to connect the old group at Orabidea with a wider pattern of infant deaths and with people whose roles crossed family, medical, and ritual settings. Amaia reported that a reliable informant had described similar rites at a house in Lesaka and a single possible leader moving between the two groups. The suspected network included people who appeared, at first, to have met for bereavement support; the investigation instead uncovered links involving Doctor Berasategui, Nurse Hidalgo, Yolanda Berrueta’s former husband, and Valentín Esparza. These associations did not by themselves establish that every person shared the same purpose, but they made Jonan’s collected case information especially consequential.

His inquiry also reached into Doctor Berasategui’s private records. A minutely detailed encrypted file kept at the clinic reportedly covered every case he had handled there or in private practice, including the Esparza case. After Berasategui’s arrest for involvement in Rosario’s release and the crimes associated with Tarttalo, high-ranking Vatican authorities took an interest in the files. Their intervention placed the material beyond Amaia’s immediate reach, while the murder left Jonan’s own stored case information missing. The two losses of access are distinct: the doctor’s records had been taken into Vatican custody, whereas the laptops, drives, and other media disappeared from Jonan’s apartment after his killing.

The surviving clues show that Jonan’s research was not confined to the infant-death cases Amaia discussed at the scene. In a later conversation with Sarasola, she referred to Jonan’s work on Víctor Oyarzabal, known as Basajaun, and asked whether Berasategui’s file recorded that he had treated him. Sarasola’s response confirmed that he knew something about the matter, while Amaia realized he had not intended to tell her. The episode enlarges the field of Jonan’s investigations but does not, on its own, establish why he was killed or who selected the materials taken from his home.

The case therefore turns on a sharp contrast between what the crime scene reveals and what it withholds. Jonan’s body, the two gunshot wounds, and the deliberate removal of his investigative storage establish a murder accompanied by a targeted search; the missing devices point toward the value of his work without identifying the intruder or proving a motive. For Amaia, the death is at once a devastating personal loss and an urgent professional demand. She insists that her colleagues document the apartment before another unit takes control, preserving what she can of the scene even as the evidence Jonan had assembled is no longer there.