The Disappearance of Sonia Ballerena's Infant's Body

The Disappearance of Sonia Ballerena's Infant's Body begins with a disturbance at a grave and ends with the discovery that the coffin is empty. The child’s family finds that the flowers have been thrown together and the stone shifted; when the grave is opened, the missing body is no longer a suspicion but a fact. The scene makes the investigation’s concern with infant deaths brutally material: the question is not only how a child died, but what happened to her remains after burial.

Discovery at the Cemetery

In Elizondo, Inés Ballarena and her daughter visit the child’s grave and notice that the flowers placed there at the burial have been heaped together as if someone had disturbed them. They alert the gravedigger, who contacts the police because he believes the grave has been forced. Inspector Iriarte calls Amaia Salazar, who is on her way to Markina’s house, and tells her to come to the cemetery. The discovery draws investigators back to the grave after dark, where the disturbance must be assessed in person rather than inferred from the family’s report.

The family has come to place candles so the child will have light. Their quiet vigil contrasts with the signs of intrusion: the flowers are disordered, and the grave no longer sits as it did after the burial. Amaia finds Inspector Iriarte, Fermín Montes, Zabalza, municipal officials, and the women at the cemetery. The family’s presence gives the scene its human stakes before the investigation establishes what has physically happened beneath the stone.

Evidence of the Grave’s Disturbance

The gravedigger says the heavy slab is displaced by at least five centimeters. When Amaia checks the gap herself, he rejects the possibility that it was left that way at the burial: he takes care to fit the stones tightly, both to keep water out and to reduce the risk of breakage. He is certain the slab was in place when the grave was closed. The small measurement therefore carries substantial weight. It turns an untidy arrangement of flowers into evidence that the grave itself has been interfered with.

Amaia orders the grave opened. The workers bring steel bars and a lever, move the flowers aside, and use the bars to roll the slab away. A ladder is lowered into the tomb, where the gravedigger descends with a smaller lever. It proves unnecessary: the child’s coffin is already open. Although two older coffins are also visible at the bottom of the tomb, the decisive finding is that the child’s coffin contains nothing. The gravedigger reports that there is no body inside.

The Family’s Loss and the Investigation

The revelation immediately changes the family’s understanding of the disturbance. One of the women cries out that the child has been taken, imagining that whoever took her before has returned for her again. Sonia Ballarena collapses to the ground. The empty coffin confirms the loss of the body, while the family’s response conveys the terror and grief of finding that even burial has not protected the child from further violation.

The episode is also part of a wider investigation into suspicious infant deaths and missing remains. Amaia later examines Jonan Etxaide’s files, where a list of addresses for investigated infant deaths includes her own sister but omits Yolanda Berrueta’s children. When she plots the cases on a map, the locations do not fit the expected pattern of crimes clustered along a major road. Instead, the marked towns form a line beside the Baztán River, from Erratzu through Elbete and Elizondo toward Oieregi. The missing child’s grave thus belongs to an inquiry in which burial sites, absent bodies, and the geography of infant deaths must be considered together, even as the evidence does not by itself establish who removed this body or why.

Significance

The discovery converts a family’s unease into a documented crime scene: disturbed flowers, a slab shifted from its proper position, and an open coffin without its occupant. Each fact narrows the distance between suspicion and confirmation, but leaves the central questions unresolved. The body is gone; the grave has been breached; the family’s fear that someone has returned is recorded as their immediate interpretation, not as proof of the perpetrator’s identity. Within the larger case, the empty coffin becomes both a concrete investigative clue and an image of how the infant deaths continue to resist closure.