What makes a soul weary? An unfinished business, maybe. It has been more than 18 years, yet Alex Guzman doesn’t know what exactly happened to his sister, Sara Guzman. Everyone knows that Sara died in a paragliding accident, but that’s not the truth, at least not the truth that Alex wants to believe. At first, he thought that it was the Lazcano family who killed Sara, but at the end of season 2, Marifer confessed to killing Sara. Marifer was Sara’s half-sister, and they both had the same father, Abel Martinez Osorio. He was a person with schizophrenia who had raped Sara’s and Alex’s mother, Lucia. But Alex and Sara don’t share the same father, which further complicates the family tree, though it is not very relevant to Sara’s murder. Abel had attacked Sara in her house when Cesar Lazcano saved her and shot Abel in the head. Abel was buried at Sara’s house, and later, Alex found his body in the backyard. The police would have arrested Alex for alleged murder as Cesar ran away from Mexico at the end of Season 2, and thus, his son, Chema, took the fall. He confessed to killing Abel because Chema, who had lost everything, was in love with Alex and wanted to protect the last thing he cherished.
“Who Killed Sara?” Season 3 begins with Chema in jail, while Cesar escapes to the Seychelles Islands with more than 13 million dollars from the family business. At the end of Season 2, Elisa Lazcano, Alex’s lover, had burnt their family casino to destroy her father’s empire, and in the aftermath of it, the family was left with nothing to survive. It was assumed that Marifer lost her life in the casino fire, but Season 3 brings her back. Marifer is in a hospital with bruises all over her body, and she has probably survived to help Alex to investigate Sara’s death further. However, the most important character of Season 3 is Reinaldo Gómez de la Cortina. He is Nicandro’s father, who is another rich kid from Alex’s circle, and used to sell drugs to Sara during their college years. Alex believed that Nicandro died in London, but we see him again in Season 3, where he and his father, Reinaldo, finally reveal what they did with Sara. Hence, without any further ado, let’s find out what happened to Sara Guzman.
Is Sara Dead?
“Who Killed Sara?” Season 3 started with a shocking revelation. Alex, with the help of some officers, opened Sara’s grave only to find an empty casket after which he declared with utmost certainty that Sara wasn’t dead, but was it the truth? The truth, in fact, was that Sara didn’t die in the paragliding accident. She suffered some internal injuries because of which she was airlifted to Mexico City, and the person in charge of this operation was Nicandro’s father, Reinaldo Gómez.
Reinaldo was a narcissistic and ambitious psychiatrist who wanted to bring about a revolution in the field of psychiatry. He wanted to create medicine or a pill to cure schizophrenia and homosexuality. The latter isn’t a mental illness, though Reinaldo had his orthodox beliefs. Even having a doctorate degree in neuropsychology couldn’t change his thoughts. His own daughter, Daniela, was a lesbian, and Reinaldo had locked her up in a special facility called the Medusa Center, situated in Cuernavaca. It was where Reinaldo had taken Sara and imprisoned her to treat her like a lab rat so that he could invent a cure to treat schizophrenia. Reinaldo had also drilled a hole in Sara’s skull as a part of the trepanation process, and Sara couldn’t bear the pain for much longer. While being in the facility, she got hold of a knife and stabbed herself to death to end the pain and horror caused by this sadistic psychiatrist.
Sara died in the Medusa Center, along with hundreds of other patients trapped and exploited by Reinaldo. They were buried in a large pasture of land somewhere in Cuernavaca, whose location was revealed to Alex by a woman named Tonya Calderon. Tonya used to work as a nurse for Dr. Hugo Alanis Musa, the doctor whom Sara’s mother, Lucia, had contacted to treat Sara for her schizophrenia. While working for Alanis, Tonya learned about Sara and informed Reinaldo, who was eagerly looking for a subject to experiment with for his Medusa Project. At the end of ‘Who Killed Sara?’ Season 3, Cesar, a womanizer and previous lover of Tonya, abducted Tonya at gunpoint to help Alex find out what exactly happened to Sara at the Medusa Center.
What Was the Medusa Project?
Reinaldo named his revolutionary project Medusa after the Greek mythological figure who, in his opinion, symbolized the scorned lady. According to Reinaldo, several people in the world have a tragic existence, a childhood trauma, or inward aggression because of which they are incapable of love or being loved. He termed this condition the Medusa Complex, where a person hides a pinch of madness behind a rational face. In Sara’s case, her biological father had violently attacked her mother, and Sara showed signs of schizophrenia from an early age. She used to hear voices in her head, which Reinaldo called the serpents in the mind that influence people to take violent actions against others or sometimes incite self-harm. Sara tried to kill Nicandro by tampering with his bike brakes, and tried to harm herself by banging her head against a wall/mirror. Because of her troubled mind, Sara had multiple toxic relationships, and she was also pregnant with Cesar’s child. Sara used to draw horrifying images in her notebook that were probably triggered by the voices in her head, and all these symptoms made her a perfect subject for Reinaldo’s experiment.
However, Reinaldo knew that he wouldn’t be able to experiment on Sara the way he wanted to, not until her family would be looking after her, and hence he orchestrated a grand scheme to stage Sara’s death in the real world to bring her to the Medusa Center. After Reinaldo discovered Sara and her mental condition from Tonya, he kept an active watch on her and on her family. He organized everything, from Alex being fired from his gym to coming to another one where he met Rodolfo and also introduced Sara to him. Reinaldo wanted Sara and Alex to become an integral part of the Lazcano family, and later plotted his own son, Nicandro to sell drugs to Sara. Reinaldo even persuaded Sara’s best friend, Marifer, to spy on Sara and influence her to meet her schizophrenic father, Abel Martinez, in a mental institution. It was Reinaldo who ordered Marifer to tamper with the parachute ropes to stage Sara’s accident so that he could take Sara away and declare her dead in the real world so that no one would ever try to find her. The only threat to his well-executed plan was Alex, who was sent to jail after Cesar tricked him into taking the blame for Sara’s accident.
Reinaldo had also been monitoring some other patients in his Medusa Center as he was obsessed with finding a cure to treat homosexuality. However, the entire idea was vague, and his actions were driven by personal reasons. He wanted to cure his daughter, Daniela, but even by the end of “Who Killed Sara?” Season 3, he failed to understand that loving a person of the same gender isn’t a mental illness. Reinaldo even tried to traumatize Chema, believing he was treating him. However, fortunately, in the end, Chema accepted the fact that he should respect his feelings instead of getting rid of them, and shouldn’t be ashamed of his orientation.
Who Was Lucia?
Sara was pregnant with Cesar’s child at the time of the paragliding accident in Valle. After Reinaldo took Sara to the Medusa Center, she gave birth to a girl, whom she named after her mother, Lucia. And more than Sara, Reinaldo had an active interest in Lucia, because she was the foundation of her miracle science experiment. In 1993, a research project was carried out under the supervision of Reinaldo and conducted by Dr. Santillan, where they found out that the gene related to schizophrenia is found on chromosome six, which is passed down by the mother. Reinaldo had already confirmed that Sara showed signs of schizophrenia, but in his experiment, he wanted to stop the transfer of genes to Lucia, and he probably succeeded in doing so, which was why, as soon as Lucia turned 18, Reinaldo arranged a foster family for her in Florida.
Lucia looked exactly like Sara, which was why when Alex and others saw her when she ran away from the facility, they couldn’t tell the difference between Sara and Lucia. In the end, Alex saved Lucia, and she finally found a family in Alex and Elisa.
Is Reinaldo Dead? Who All Died Because Of Him?
In his madness, Reinaldo not only took the lives of his patients and their families but also caused the death of his own son, Nicandro, who died while trying to bring Lucia back to the clinic. On the other hand, Reinaldo shot Alex’s mother in order to protect his ambitious dream project from getting exposed, as Alex’s mother was trying to find answers after she got hold of Sara’s diary.
After Tonya informed Alex about Sara’s death, Alex lost his patience and decided to take revenge on the psychiatrist, whose brutal experiments led to his sister’s death. Alex had arranged some heavy weaponry from the black market, and he quickly drove to Cuernavaca to destroy Reinaldo’s empire. At the fortified clinic, Alex opened fire on Reinaldo’s guards and finally confronted the evil. In a gunfight, Alex shot Reinaldo in his leg and later bound him to a bed and attached the equipment to his body to give him a painful electric shock that ultimately resulted in Reinaldo’s death. Reinaldo died the same way that he killed hundreds of his patients.
However, near the clinic entrance, a guard pulled out a gun and shot Rodolfo, who later died because of the fatal injury. Fortunately, Elisa and Alex were able to rescue Chema, Daniela, and other patients from the clinic, but Marifer probably died there because of her incurable bruises. After everything was dealt with, Cesar arrived at the scene and decided to take all the blame to save Alex from arrest. He requested Alex to run away, and as soon as the police arrived at the location, Cesar confessed to killing Reinaldo and Abel Martinez.
‘Who Killed Sara?’ Season 3: Ending Explained – Why Did Cesar Take All The Blame?
If any character had a proper transformation arc in “Who Killed Sara?” then it was Cesar Lazcano. He was an anti-hero who decided to redeem himself in the end. Cesar was dying of pancreatic cancer and had only two months to live, in which he chose to do one good thing for his family. All of Cesar’s children, be it Rodolfo, Chema, or Elisa, hated him for being a distant and emotionally abusive father. His wife, Mariana, knew all about his affairs, and in the eyes of the law, Cesar had been running numerous illegal businesses like human trafficking and smuggling.
At the end of Season 2, Cesar ran away to the Seychelles Islands with more than 13 million dollars to evade taxes and live a comfortable life away from his family until Alex intervened and hacked all his money, only to bring him back to Mexico. Alex and everyone around him knew that there was only one single thing that Cesar loved more than himself, and it was money. But at the end of “Who Killed Sara?” Season 3, he surprised everyone.
Cesar didn’t reveal to anyone about his pancreatic cancer and silently bore the pain. There was no treatment available for him, and no amount of money could save him, so he decided to sacrifice his life to protect Alex. Cesar loved Alex more than he loved Rodolfo or Chema. Alex was the kind of son Cesar wanted but never had, the fact that he mentioned from time to time. He knew that Alex would take care of the family after him, and hence he took all the blame. The court of law charged him with human trafficking, tax fraud, and falsification of documents, along with the murder of Abel Martnez and Reinaldo. He was sentenced to 40 years of imprisonment, but because of his condition, he wouldn’t survive more than two months. He will probably die there. However, the series’ end doesn’t reveal his death. We just saw a father screaming his guts out in pain and his vulnerability was depicted for the first time in the series. Until now, Cesar showed no signs of emotions or love, but we see a transformed version of him, a transformation that differentiates him from Reinaldo.
On the other hand, Mariana became a nun after Cesar’s arrest. Her children abandoned her, but she thought about them till the very end. She continues to inflict pain on herself, holding herself accountable for numerous sins she committed throughout her life, and hopefully, only death will bring her peace.
In the closing shot, Elisa, Alex, Chema, and Lucia visited Sara’s grave, where Reinaldo had buried hundreds of other patients. And so, Alex informed the authorities about this hidden location so that all those people who were brutally murdered druing the experiment could receive a dignified burial from their families and loved ones. After paying their last respects to Sara, the four people walked away to a happy future away from all the adversaries who caused so much pain in their lives. “Who Killed Sara?” Season 3 finally ends on a peaceful and satisfying note.
