The last time Blanca Martínez Santamaría saw her older brother, Miguel Ángel, he was four months away from turning 45. It was April 2005 when he’d set off by train from their hometown in northern Spain with almost €12,000 in his bank account and plans to travel across Europe.
Blanca always knew her brother as adventurous. He had lived abroad in the past few years and could be restless and unpredictable. Miguel Ángel had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early twenties and had even been sectioned. But, for Blanca, the diagnosis didn’t characterise him. He was much more, she told me.
Miguel Ángel was wiry, with short dark hair, large, almond-shaped eyes and thick eyebrows. When he was in good health, he was charming and caring, the type of person who went out of his way to help anyone in need. “It was something he was born with,” Blanca said.
Miguel Ángel also had a dark sense of humour, acerbic was probably the right word. Blanca, who had suffered severe bouts of asthma when she was young, was regularly ill. She remembered that Miguel Ángel always told her: “What a shame that you’re going to die first among all us siblings.” It was a harsh joke, one she never forgot as she got older, mainly because, well, he’d been wrong.
Blanca is in her late fifties, of medium height and solid build, with glasses and long, dark-brown hair and a bushy fringe. The faint smile curled on her lips seems to convey something between anguish and learnt insouciance. She speaks fast, in crescendos of exasperation. Her laugh is raucous, like a seagull.
I first met her at her house in Getxo, northern Spain, during the summer of 2021, after I had read about her story in the local press. That day, the coastal air was hot and thick, gulls squawked outside the window, and the humidity hung over us like a wet towel on a radiator. In her dimly lit sitting room, Blanca was surrounded by pictures of Miguel Ángel, his old watch, his tattered ID and several ring binders as thick as phone books piled up on the coffee table. “Can you believe how badly this whole thing was done, how badly it was screwed up?” she said repeatedly.
We spoke on and off over the next few years, and, each time, Blanca started our conversations the same way. She said this story wasn’t about her, but about her brother, Miguel Ángel. She didn’t want him to become a statistic, just another case in a dark locked storeroom in the back of some anonymous police station. Miguel Ángel was a living, breathing person from a decent family and had plans for his life. He’d left an unfillable hole. “He took me to the first disco I went to. The first joint I smoked in my life was also with him,” she told me. When he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 23, Blanca was the one by his side.
In the dense quiet of the living room, Blanca returned to that day five months after Miguel Ángel left Spain. At eight o’clock on September 29 2005, the phone rang at the Martínezes’ house. The officer at the Bilbao police station told Blanca that Miguel Ángel’s body — or the corpse of someone carrying a photocopy of his ID card — had turned up on the shore at Lidingö, an upmarket residential district east of Stockholm, Sweden. When the family went to the local police station that night, everything was confusing, horrifying. The police said that Miguel Ángel had been killed and thrown into the water. He had yet to be officially identified by DNA.
The news disrupted the normality to which the family was accustomed. What was happening? The Martínezes were respected members of a quiet coastal community, where not much happened. Ángel Martínez, Blanca’s father, was an entrepreneur; her mother, Isabel, a housewife, and the four siblings had all been educated privately. By their reckoning, they lived in a world far removed from such grisly acts.
Several days later, on October 3, Blanca received a call from the consulate. The facts were not what had been described at the Bilbao police station. There’d probably been a mistake (as the Spanish authorities later admitted) due to the difficulty of interpreting Swedish. Now that the investigation was no longer confidential, the Swedish police could share with the embassy that Miguel Ángel’s death was not a murder case. In fact, he’d drowned, and it was probably suicide. They said he’d probably jumped from one of the ferries that crossed between Helsinki and Stockholm.
“The first few days were a shock. I couldn’t sleep. My other brother, Fernando, lives in California, and I spent nights talking to him because it felt like this couldn’t be happening to us,” Blanca told me. It wasn’t until mid-October that the family planned to go to Stockholm to identify the body and learn more about the incident. She added: “I really wanted to go, but my husband was swamped at work, and I’d just had twins.”
Her two cousins, Elisabete and Mario, went instead. On their first stop at the Spanish consulate, the consul gave them more details about the case. They were then driven to a nearby police station, where the officers cautioned that they shouldn’t see the body. It had been in the water for weeks and was in an advanced state of decomposition. “It’s not that they didn’t let us go. They just said it would be better for us,” Elisabete told me this year. Mario remembers the officer’s warning as somewhat firmer: “He was pretty blunt.”
Even so, by their admission, both were naive. “We came from a world, and I know it sounds somewhat classist, but things like this didn’t and hadn’t happened to us,” Elisabete told me. Both believed everything the authorities told them. They didn’t ask questions, and they came home with a glass jar — “like one that would hold chickpeas” — containing Miguel Ángel’s possessions and a wad of documentation. “Looking back, I would have done things differently,” Mario said. “If we had achieved what we’d set out to do, we could have saved the family a lot of heartache.”
For Blanca, back home in the throes of sleepless nights with her twins and caring for her elder daughter, communication between the two countries proved exhausting. If that wasn’t enough, another country was about to come into the mix. In his will, Miguel Ángel had stated his wish to be buried in London, where his former girlfriend was also interred. The family organised the transfer of his remains to England. On November 4 2005, his body arrived at Heathrow airport, where it remained for days because “paperwork accompanying the body did not give a cause or explain how the death may have come about”, the Westminster Coroner’s Court reported.
Blanca and her family arrived in London on November 17; the burial was scheduled for the next day. At 7pm, an English funeral home representative informed them that the burial could not proceed as the coroner had not authorised it. The cause of death was unclear, and the UK mandated both identifying a body and determining a cause of death before a burial could take place. A second autopsy had been ordered.
The Martínezes didn’t want to endure more waiting or the uncertainty it brought. They needed to bury Miguel Ángel, they needed peace. After much back and forth with the coroner’s office, the funeral home, and the Spanish embassy in London, authorisation was granted, and the burial occurred on Saturday November 19 at Gunnersbury Cemetery in London.
Four months later, the results of the second autopsy were sent to the family in Spain. The findings were stranger than they could have imagined. Miguel Ángel’s corpse had arrived in the UK with no heart and 60 per cent of its liver missing. His lungs showed no signs of drowning or water inhalation. Moreover, due to the advanced state of decomposition, the British pathologist could not determine the exact cause of death. During an inquest held at Westminster Coroner’s Court in early 2006, the presiding coroner declared an open verdict.
In March, after the Martínezes received the second autopsy report and after the Swedish police had officially closed the case, suspecting suicide but offering nothing more conclusive, most of the family was left stupefied. First, they were told he was murdered, then that it was suicide. Then they found out that he’d arrived in London without a heart, and the English coroner could find no evidence to suggest he’d drowned.
Blanca, the youngest of the four siblings, responded differently. She started asking questions. “When I look back now, I’m not surprised what she went on to do,” her older brother Fernando told me. “Even before all this happened, when Blanca thought the world was a kinder place, she often resolved problems through conflict, through confrontation.”
Blanca began working full-time on it, collecting and scrutinising police and autopsy reports from Sweden, Spain and the UK. She dropped the kids off, and sometimes didn’t look up from her computer until it was time to pick them up again.
Blanca tried to reconstruct the timelines and understand when things had gone wrong. She learnt that matters weren’t good even before Miguel Ángel entered Sweden. In May 2005, he was stopped by the Norwegian police while walking down a highway. They noted that Miguel Ángel seemed “distressed”, but he refused their help.
Two months later, Miguel Ángel was in Sweden. On July 1, he visited the Spanish embassy in Stockholm, claiming he was having trouble with his debit card. The embassy workers offered him an emergency transfer, but he refused, saying he had enough money. One embassy worker allegedly overheard him say he needed to leave Sweden.
A month later, on August 1 2005, a few weeks before Miguel Ángel’s death, it appeared his debit-card troubles hadn’t been resolved. That morning, the 45-year-old had gone to Nordea bank in Karlstad to make a large cash withdrawal. According to the Swedish police report obtained by Blanca, however, Miguel Ángel had lost his documentation, and the manager refused to process his request. Miguel Ángel became nervous and refused to leave, so the manager called the police.
The officers took him to the police station, where he remained in custody until 4.20pm. As he was not carrying an ID card or passport, the Swedish police contacted the Spanish authorities to request his identification. The Spanish embassy sent the Swedish police a photocopy of his ID card at 7.12pm that day.
Rather strangely, this or a similar photocopy later identified Miguel Ángel. Blanca would learn that a nurse in the Stockholm morgue had found the photocopy in a trouser pocket of the deceased. When Blanca later tracked her down, the nurse told her, “I checked Miguel Ángel’s pockets because he looked of Spanish descent.” Of Spanish ancestry herself, the nurse explained that she had been curious.
If that wasn’t odd enough, the photocopy was in perfect condition. The ink was not smudged, and the paper remained uncrumpled. Blanca wondered: how could the photocopy be in his pocket if the embassy had sent it after he’d left the police station? More importantly, how could it be in such pristine condition if the body had been in the water for weeks, as the Swedish police insisted?
There were other holes in the investigation. Nowhere in the report that Blanca received from Stockholm did the Swedish police verify that the body was found in Lidingö. “There are no photographs of the body or its recovery,” she said. Also, Mario remembered that when he and Elisabete went to lay flowers at the site where the corpse had been found, the police could not locate it. “We were walking up and down that river for ages,” he told me. Even the forensic department took no photographic documentation. There was only a vague sketch of the bridge and the river.
Moreover, the person who found the body, Sara Adams, a British citizen, was also mysterious. The police report that mentioned her name provided no identifying information except her phone number. “I rang it many times, but no one ever picked up,” Blanca told me.
Still, perhaps the most chilling aspect for Blanca was the cause of her brother’s death. She couldn’t get the report from the Westminster Coroner’s Court out of her head. That report had found no evidence to suggest that Miguel Ángel had drowned, as claimed by the Swedes, who also said that he probably jumped from a ferry or a bridge. When Blanca called the ferry company to search for traces of her brother, she could find no ticket under his name and no passenger or crew member who had seen Miguel Ángel that day. Furthermore, in his psychiatric reports, dating from before his trip, the doctors stated that he showed “no signs of suicidal ideation”. Ultimately, however, the British pathologist said he couldn’t determine the precise cause of death because of the absence of Miguel Ángel’s heart.
In February 2007, Blanca wrote an email to the Swedish police in which she asked 15 questions, among them: why had they said her brother had died by suicide? Who was Sara Adams? Where did they find Miguel Ángel’s ID? And where was his heart?
In their reply a week later, the Swedish police told her via email that they couldn’t give out Sara Adams’s details for privacy reasons, that her brother’s ID was found in his pocket and that they believed he died by suicide because “close to where his body had been found, there’s a bridge, and ferries also pass by there”. Regarding the heart, the answer was more detailed. “According to the pathologist,” they wrote, “she took only two small pieces of 2 × 2cm [of the heart] to send for analysis. The pathologist also states that, since the body was in such a bad state, it could have been difficult to detect the heart.” (Mats Kemi, a detective inspector from the Stockholm police, in response to Blanca’s allegations, told me the police always investigate if “a crime has been committed in every conceivable way”.)
This answer struck Blanca as extremely strange. Though she’d seen the British autopsy report, she realised she hadn’t yet seen the results from the first one done in Sweden. She needed to see that report, and quickly. When she finally received it several weeks later and had it translated into Spanish, what she found contradicted everything the police had told her. The pathologist stated that the heart weighed “261 grams and was of the expected shape and size”. Also, the liver weighed 1.343kg and was of standard shape and size.
Sometimes, Blanca simply curled up in bed and cried. She felt frustrated and small. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw her brother, who didn’t deserve what had happened to him, nor did anyone else. She felt resentful and angry but mostly just helpless. She sought answers everywhere she could. She pleaded with the Spanish authorities to provide more help. She even filed an official complaint with the Swedish ombudsman, an office responsible for protecting the rights and freedoms of citizens. In 2009, the latter replied, “No evidence of illegal or incorrect action by the police or forensic authorities was discovered.”
Fernando, her brother in California, felt she was falling off a precipice. From his home thousands of miles away, he could only listen to her woes and “extend branches to stop her [from] falling all the way to the bottom”, he told me.
Friends and relatives also noted a profound change in Blanca following Miguel Ángel’s death. “She wasn’t the happy-go-lucky [person] that she had been,” Begoña, her best friend, told me. The once naive girl from a small town had grown wary and sceptical of authority. “She wouldn’t believe anything anyone said,” her cousin Elisabete said.
Miguel Ángel’s case was also isolating Blanca from her friends and family. “ She talked about it all the time. Some people just couldn’t take it any more,” Begoña told me. Everything revolved around it. There was no trip to Bilbao or Madrid, for instance, that didn’t involve Blanca dropping in at a local police station or court to file some sort of notice, pester some detective or petition some lawyer. There was no day out just for the sake of the family. The case took up all Blanca’s time, robbing her of precious moments with her children and her husband, causing a “sort of gap” between them, Blanca later admitted.
I’d seen this before — mostly during my time in Mexico or Central America, where I’d covered the consequences of the war on drugs and parents searching for their relatives kidnapped by cartels. The state had failed them, and they had to investigate their own relative’s crimes, sometimes digging in the desert or in steaming forests for traces of their bodies. The families didn’t know if their loved ones were alive or dead. They didn’t know where they were. They lived every day in limbo, clenched, imagining the inevitable. They couldn’t grieve; they couldn’t stop hoping. Uncertainty created an all-consuming anxiety that forced them to understand the world through tragedy. Often, the past does not allow the present to breathe.
“I’m so sorry for the moments I’ve lost with my children,” she told me one afternoon in her parents’ living room. These moments of regret weren’t uncommon. Sometimes, she’d text me wondering if she’d been too straightforward, too harsh about her brother, that she was having a “dreadful day”. But when I asked her if she felt that her quest had isolated her, Blanca was clear. She told me she strove to accept her situation, understanding that tragedy could strike anyone and that she was not unique in her suffering. Fate could be random and unconcerned with its cruelty, and it had decided to strike her. She felt that the course she was taking was somehow unalterable and inevitable. She couldn’t turn back. Blanca was certain the Swedish authorities were lying and must be covering something up. There were just too many inconsistencies and too much evasiveness.
April 2012 brought a breakthrough: the Swedish pathologist who had conducted the first autopsy on Miguel Ángel’s body sent Blanca an email. “I have some problems understanding some of your questions, but I will try to answer them as I understand them,” the text began. The pathologist explained that an autopsy report must thoroughly describe the examination, although photographs were not always included. She said that autopsies were performed only on weekdays, usually two to four days after receiving the necessary documents from the police. In cases in which death occurred outside a hospital and without witnesses, an approximate time of death was established, though that could sometimes be challenging. Most jarringly, the pathologist insisted that, after an autopsy, all organs were meticulously replaced in the body. (Detective Inspector Kemi reiterated this to me in his response to Blanca’s allegations.)
But how could this be? The British pathologist had clearly stated that the heart was missing. At first, Blanca thought that perhaps the Swedish pathologist had forgotten to replace the heart or that it had been discarded. Yet, in her email she emphasised that this couldn’t have happened.
The contradiction led Blanca to some worrying places in her mind. Miguel Ángel was missing two organs, which no one could explain. And though she didn’t believe in conspiracy theories, what had happened to her and her family was sometimes so absurd that it didn’t feel real, as though she were a character in a Stieg Larsson novel.
Blanca began suspecting that Miguel Ángel had somehow been targeted. “They must have taken him for some sort of tramp or beggar and taken advantage of him,” she told me. Maybe this was a case of human trafficking. Maybe someone had killed Miguel Ángel for his organs.
Organ trafficking is more common than most people believe. Transplantation medicine has seen enormous advances. Still, the number of legal transplants covers the needs of only about 10 per cent of all patients on waiting lists worldwide. The World Health Organization estimates that about 10,000 kidneys are sold on the black market every year for prices ranging from $50,000 to $120,000, and the Washington DC-based think-tank Global Financial Integrity estimates the industry is worth as much as $1.7bn a year. According to experts and investigators with whom I spoke at Europol and the UN, the underground industry is challenging to track and analyse because hardly any victims or vendors ever come forward. Moreover, the actors involved in the illegal sourcing and supply of these organs are often doctors and surgeons — revered members of the medical community and usually above suspicion. Nevertheless, both agencies conclude that the illegal organ trade is a growing industry and that the statistics available probably underestimate its size and reach.
The more Blanca read, the more she became convinced Miguel Ángel had been trafficked and his organs sold. She started writing to Amnesty International, MPs and forensic pathologists across Europe to see whether they might agree, but they all said they couldn’t help.
In 2012, she complained to the Basque ombudsman, but nothing came of it. In 2014, she filed another official complaint with the Swedish authorities, but again nothing happened. Several years later, she even took the issue to the European parliament, where several MEPs asked whether the treatment she had received from the Swedish authorities violated human rights in cases of human trafficking. The parliament replied that, while Miguel Ángel’s case might be human trafficking, it “would not comment on individual cases”.
Blanca had initially wanted to do all this behind closed doors, but she had encountered too much opacity, patronising behaviour and even assaults on her character. “Some people even told me that I must have been crazy like my brother,” she said. By 2014, she’d had enough. She decided to go to the press.
Articles about her brother’s mysterious death appeared in El Mundo, El Periódico and El País. The headlines read “The Enigma of the Man without a Heart” and “The Body without a Heart”. Each story exposed the inconsistencies in the Swedish police’s investigation and the Spanish authorities’ unwillingness to help Blanca.
While Blanca hoped this coverage would vindicate her struggle, and it did for a time, she quickly became disillusioned. When an article about the case was published in one of Sweden’s most prominent newspapers, Dagens Nyheter, it went mainly unanswered.
“Nothing happened. No one wrote me, no one wanted to know anything,” Blanca said. The realisation was crushing. The anxiety was immense. What was going on? Why did no one care? What were they hiding?
Uncertainty is an insidious feeling. It leaves infinite room for doubt. Blanca began to doubt everything and see plausibility in anything. She had spent the past few years trying to get people to believe that her brother had been trafficked and murdered, but something else began to nag at her. Part of her still couldn’t believe that her brother had died in this gruesome way. Maybe the whole thing had been a colossal mix-up, Blanca thought. The investigation, or lack thereof, had been conducted so poorly that maybe they hadn’t even had the right person. Maybe the person buried in London wasn’t Miguel Ángel.
Indeed, one thing that had troubled Blanca from the beginning was the Swedish police’s identification process. Way back in late September 2005, the Spanish police had requested DNA samples from Miguel Ángel’s parents to identify their son officially, but the procedure never bore fruit. The reason for this: several days later, the Swedish authorities informed their Spanish counterparts that they’d obtained a print from Miguel Ángel’s left index finger that matched a print previously sent by the Spanish national police. However, documents that Blanca tracked down in 2014 revealed a glaring contradiction.
In those documents, she saw that on September 29 2005 the Swedes had informed the Spaniards that only the prints from the left hand were usable due to the advanced decomposition of the right hand. The next day, however, the Spaniards told the Swedish authorities that they had only the index finger of the right hand on record. How could it have been identified if the prints were not from the same hand?
To Blanca, none of the information seemed to make sense, and all this was coupled with the fact that there had never been an official identification of Miguel Ángel’s body. The Swedish police had advised against it at the time. (They later told me that a successful match between Miguel Ángel’s prints and ID was made, and there had been no need for a DNA sample).
In late 2017, Blanca travelled to Sweden in a last-ditch attempt to make sense of everything and track down any more outstanding documents tied to the Swedish investigation. When she arrived at the police station, however, the officer in charge told her that the case was closed. While sympathetic to her plight, he allegedly admitted that no one would help her with the case because “we did everything so badly from the beginning”.
At that point, Blanca knew she and the family needed some sort of closure. It seemed to her the more she investigated the case, the more questions she kept digging up and the more uncertain everything became. She couldn’t live like that any more, and her parents couldn’t live like that any more. She needed to give them something, some sort of peace. She would need to have the body buried in London exhumed; only then would she know whether it was her brother, and only then would more clues emerge as to how he might have died.
By 2018, Blanca was set to get some answers. The British authorities had given her permission to exhume her brother’s body. The only question now was who would pay for it. Blanca petitioned regional and national governments in Spain, and while assurances were made behind closed doors, no money was forthcoming. Only in 2020, when a Spanish film producer picked up her story and offered to accompany her to London and pay for the exhumation, could Blanca plan a trip.
After days of waiting in a north London flat during the Covid-19 lockdown, the exhumation was scheduled for July 20 2021, with the reburial the next day. More than ever, Blanca missed her mother, Isabel, who had died a year earlier, knowing nothing of the developments in Miguel Ángel’s case or whether it was even her son buried in London. Her father was also not long for the world, yet somehow he held on, his anger, his need to know the whereabouts of his son’s remains carrying him through. It had to be so terrible to have your own child die before you, Blanca reflected, and in an almost unimaginable way.
The British authorities extracted the body with no one present and took it to the morgue, where Blanca was able to enter. She saw a stretcher, tools, and forensic equipment, including masks and other items necessary for such an investigation. There were screens in the room, and the council officials closely monitored everything. However, Blanca didn’t stop to see her brother’s remains. “I didn’t want to. That day was terrible for me.”
After the autopsy, the body was returned to Gunnersbury Cemetery, where four tall, formally dressed men with white gloves carried it to its final resting place. Blanca felt something like pride. More than anything, she wanted Miguel Ángel to have a dignified and solemn funeral worthy of the person she’d known. She just hoped it was really him.
Several days later, the results of the autopsy came back. The body was Miguel Ángel’s.
The pathologist who conducted the third autopsy, Dr Aitor Curiel, could find no evidence that his body had spent time in the water and no evidence to confirm death by drowning, coinciding with the results of the second autopsy. But, regarding Blanca’s theory that her brother was trafficked for his organs, well, according to the pathologist, that was unlikely.
Dr Curiel noted that the body had been well preserved when exhumed, having been embalmed. While he confirmed the British authorities’ statement that Miguel Ángel’s heart was missing, he saw no signs of incisions, indicating that the organ had been illegally removed. “The only incisions I saw were the ones that had been done postmortem during the autopsy,” he told me. There was no evidence to suggest organ trafficking.
One afternoon in late 2023, I sat in Blanca’s parents’ living room in Algorta, just north of Bilbao. She was reflective. She shared with me a report from a local psychiatrist who had concluded that she suffered from PTSD and depression. “But I have a very high self-esteem,” she said, laughing. “I sometimes think that everyone around me is a bit silly.”
And it turned out she was, in part, right. Through a series of legal motions, she convinced a Spanish judge to officially petition the Swedish authorities to examine possible negligence in their investigation. “I just want the authorities to recognise that my brother was a victim and that, as his family, we are too.” (Detective Inspector Kemi told me that, “Had this happened today, it would not have been done any other way.”)
Blanca still believed that her brother’s organs had been trafficked. “What else would I think when I still haven’t received a satisfactory answer?” Still, she recognised the subjectiveness of her belief and the confirmation bias she might have suffered from. Maybe she’d just invented a logic to make sense of the situation, a cosmology in which the random cruelty of the universe could be explained.
Blanca told me she had been speaking with another forensic pathologist, who said the autopsy verdict wasn’t definitive per se; it was a hypothesis. “But his point was that these were all opinions. There’s no longer enough evidence to find out what happened; everything is now just supposition,” Blanca explained. She had become certain that she would never discover what happened to Miguel Ángel, and she’d come to accept that.
Misfortune, though, had given Blanca something; a purpose that perhaps she would not have acquired otherwise. She had learnt so much. She now knew about international law, how organised crime works and how police investigations should work. She had met other families of disappeared people and helped them in their campaigns and struggles. She appeared on TV shows and in newspaper articles. She learnt to speak publicly on issues she never would have dreamt of knowing about. But most importantly, she felt she’d done something meaningful. She’d fought for something she believed in, for someone she loved. “That’s the legacy I leave my children,” she told me.
As I got up to leave, Blanca took me to Miguel Ángel’s old bedroom. She opened the closet and took out a bulky, dusty cardboard box full of vinyls. “Miguel Angel was in a band once,” she said. “Look, he had everything here.” There were vinyls from The Beatles, Elton John, Chris Norman and Suzi Quatro. Blanca ventured a fragile smile as she continued flicking through the stacks. Miguel Ángel was still very much alive to her. She had never stopped spending time with him, talking about him, trying to figure out what had happened. She’d told me so many times she didn’t want people to forget Miguel Ángel. But, most of all, she didn’t want to forget him.
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