Markina shoots Yolanda dead

Judge Markina shoots Yolanda Berrueta dead at the family tomb in Ainhoa, intervening as she tries to open it and killing her in front of Amaia Salazar. The shot transforms an investigation into the disappearance of children’s remains into a confrontation with Markina himself: his stated concern for Amaia cannot conceal that he sent Yolanda into the case to obstruct her search.

Background and Immediate Circumstances

The shooting follows Amaia’s effort to understand a pattern of infant deaths through their locations. On a map, she plots the investigated cases and her own sister’s death, then excludes the Ainhoa cases; the remaining marks form a line along the Baztán River, from Erratzu through Elbete and Elizondo toward Oieregi. The river’s course gives the scattered deaths a newly legible shape, while the children’s unmarked, brief lives sharpen the human stakes of the pattern.

Amaia’s working profile adds a troubling social and family dimension. The victims were all girls; their families had been in poor economic circumstances when the children died, then experienced improved fortunes afterward. In several cases, family members had spoken of things getting better from then on. Yolanda’s own history includes severe depression after the death of her first baby and a later pregnancy that her husband pressed her to undertake despite medical advice against it. She became intensely devoted to the children who followed, burdened by guilt and bitterness. Yet Amaia has no judicial route to confirm that Yolanda’s daughter is absent from her grave in Ainhoa, leaving suspicion unresolved while the map continues to point toward the river.

That uncertainty brings Yolanda to the tomb with explosives. She tells Amaia she believes her daughter is inside and admits she may have used too little explosive, with more in her car. Amaia approaches from behind and places a hand on Yolanda’s shoulder; Yolanda turns in fury and punches her, knocking her down against the steps. Amaia draws her weapon, but before she can regain control of the encounter, the fatal shot comes from elsewhere.

The Shot and Its Immediate Aftermath

The shot erupts beside Amaia Salazar’s ear, leaving her instantly deaf. Yolanda falls to the ground, a spreading stain of blood across her chest. Amaia turns in terror and points her pistol toward the shooter: Judge Markina, standing in the rain with a grim expression. Even as she checks Yolanda’s pulse, she keeps her weapon trained on him. When Amaia asks what he has done, he says he believed Yolanda was about to attack her.

The Revelation Behind the Shot

With Yolanda’s body lying in the rain at the tomb entrance, Amaia asks Markina why he sent Yolanda to her. He admits that he saw her confused account of her missing children as an opportunity: Amaia would investigate, find the children in their graves, and conclude that Yolanda’s claims were the delusions of a disturbed woman. The apparent lead had been arranged to discredit the very question it raised.

Markina explains that he had not expected Amaia to act against him. The order sought by Jueza De Gouvenain extended to the children’s coffins without specifying them; if Yolanda had asked to see the other coffin, Markina acknowledges, it would have had to be shown to her. He says he was compelled to intervene before that could happen, while admitting he had not anticipated Yolanda would use explosives to blow open the family tomb. His explanation recasts the shooting as the culmination of an effort to control what the investigation could uncover, even as he presents it as a response to immediate danger.

Amaia confronts him with the human cost of that plan: Yolanda had been allowed to suffer, sent into a situation in which she was likely to be destroyed, and then killed. Markina answers that Yolanda had knocked Amaia down and possessed explosives, so he believed she might also have a weapon. The claim offers a justification for the instant of the shot, but does not undo his admission that he deliberately used Yolanda’s distress to steer Amaia away from the truth.

When Amaia asks why Markina had approached her, he says that falling in love with her had not been planned. He then turns the declaration into a claim of possession, insisting that they belong to each other and that she loves him despite what she is now seeing. The intimacy he invokes stands beside his manipulation and the body at the tomb: the revelation makes his professed love part of the danger, not an answer to it.

The Wider Pattern and Its Limits

The case map was built through slow, uneven parish inquiries: investigators had to identify each child’s parish and speak with priests, the only people able to consult baptism records, during limited office hours. The work reduced four cases in Hondarribia to two; one excluded child was a German girl who died while her parents were on holiday, and the other had been baptized. When the search broadened across Navarra, the number of cases grew, but limiting it to towns beside the river produced a more defined cluster: Elizondo, Oronoz-Mugaire, Narbarte, Doneztebe, and Hondarribia. Adding earlier cases in a second color extended the marks from the river’s source to its mouth, where it takes the name Bidasoa, and included the girl from Argi Beltz, Amaia’s sister, the child from Lesaka, and other local deaths. The pattern strengthened the investigation without resolving whether Yolanda’s daughter was among the missing remains; that unresolved question is what brings her to the tomb, where Markina’s shot abruptly turns the inquiry into a personal confrontation.