Saturday April 22, 2023 | 12:00 p.m.
The crime of María Yess (63), a merchant shot in July 2016 at her home in Puerto Rico, already has a date for debate after the case was brought to trial three times. According to detailed judicial sources consulted by El Territorio, Criminal Court One of Posadas set hearings for September 14, 15 and 18 of this year.
In the case, the victim’s daughter, Andrea Elizabeth Mieres (37), and Paulino Ramón Olmedo (30), who was a partner of Mieres, will sit in the dock. Regarding the woman, she is charged as the author of triple aggravated homicide: for her bond, treachery and greed. She could be sentenced to life in prison.
Olmedo, meanwhile, is indicated as a necessary participant in aggravated homicide for treachery and greed.
Mieres and Olmedo will arrive at the trial in freedom because in August of last year Judge Ariel Belda Palomar determined their release because they had been in pretrial detention for four years without a sentence. The same judge – the investigation was in charge of Éctor Acosta – brought the case to trial in December 2020.
The last request for the case to go to trial was from the surrogate prosecutor, Natalia Romina Deffis, who is in charge of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Civil, Commercial, Labor and Family Court of Jardín América. Previously, the file had been annulled twice by the Misiones Appeals Chamber.
The case
As stated in the investigation of the case, the murder of the merchant Yess occurred during the night of July 24, 2016, inside her home on Río Grande street, two blocks from the Municipality of Puerto Rico. There the woman attended a neighborhood kiosk.
That night two shots were heard, one of which hit the victim’s head. When the police officers arrived at the scene, they found the lifeless homeowner and her daughter Mieres in the midst of a scene of tears and despair.
But what at the time seemed like a state of shock, was actually a montage, since in a short time the investigators finished ruling out the possibility of an act of insecurity and leaned towards a family plot as the hypothesis behind the crime.
At that moment the woman reported that the doorbell was heard and that her mother went to the window of the kiosk that faces the street and in those circumstances the shots were recorded. However, the skills of the Criminalistics staff and the work of the detectives of the Homicide Department reconstructed something else.
It was determined that one of the shots from the long 22 caliber revolver used in the event – which was never located by the Misiones Police – hit the refrigerator in the place and the other had gone through the victim’s head.
Based on the analysis of the trajectory of the shots, the Police scientists reached two decisive conclusions. The first of these was that the shot that hit the refrigerator could not have come from outside the house in any way, while the next was that the victim’s body could never have fallen the way it did if the bullet was fired. It was in the direction given by his daughter.
The remains of gunpowder in the woman detected by the paraffin test ended up pointing her out as the main suspect in matricide. She quickly left behind the accusation against an ex-convict from the neighborhood that she herself had indicated or a fact of insecurity as the motive for the crime.
Greed and treachery
During the investigation of the fact, for the investigators the greedy purpose that the couple had to carry out the murder was well determined. The woman wanted to keep a piece of land that Yess would not give up. Several testimonials provided during the investigation stage support this thesis.
One of them has to do with the contribution made by a woman who would have contacted the defendants with the intention of buying the property that was owned by the victim.
In her testimony before the investigations, the witness commented that after a series of conversations everything had been agreed for the business to be completed between both parties and that there was only one detail that the alleged sellers needed to finalize. The latter, it is believed, was simply to make Yess disappear.
On the other hand, the figure of treachery was also fully demonstrated during the investigation of the case. In this sense, the sources consulted indicated that the merchant was attacked in a totally defenseless state, while she was at her home.
According to the police reconstruction of what happened, it is known that on the night of the attack, at a certain moment, Olmedo arrived at his mother-in-law’s home, rang the bell and waited expectantly a few meters from the residence.
It was there that Yess, thinking she was a customer, went to the window where she usually served, at which time her daughter took the opportunity to shoot her mother from behind. In this way, the sixty-year-old never imagined that it would be her own daughter who would shoot her.
On the other hand, during the interviews they had with psychologists from the Judiciary at the Gessell Chamber, Yess’s granddaughters -who were also in the house at the time of the event- stated that they did not see anyone suspicious that day. This ended up throwing overboard the alibi of an alleged act of robbery that Mieres herself told the Police when justifying the attack suffered by her mother.
This version pointed to a young man who was known in the area for carrying out several robberies, who after being investigated by the Justice, later it was shown that he had no type of participation in the homicide. As if that were not enough, another key story to unmask the couple was that of a mechanic who also testified as a witness in the case.
According to this worker’s account, hours after the homicide, Olmedo came to his workshop and asked that his motorcycle be disassembled for an alleged repair. The inquiries later confirmed that with this same vehicle the defendant went to the home of his mother-in-law during the night of July 24, 2016 and once the crime was committed he went to the workshop.
In figures
$500 thousandThe land that Mieres wanted to appropriate was offered for half a million pesos on social networks by who was his partner at the time.
The sale that complicates Olmedo
Three months before the crime, Paulino took care of publishing the following notice on the Facebook social network and on the OLX and Alamaula sites: “I am selling a piece of land in Puerto Rico, price $500,000, I receive a vehicle of my interest as part of payment,” and He left his cell phone.
That would indicate that they acted with premeditation, but far from any suspicion a Buenos Aires buyer contacted and agreed to purchase for 450 thousand pesos.
The defendant never said that the property was not his, in fact, he lied saying that it belonged to his girlfriend Andrea and that they were going to reserve it for him. The buyers traveled from Buenos Aires to finalize the deal, arriving in Puerto Rico on July 11.
They were received by Mieres, who showed them the land but the transaction could not be carried out because that day the notary’s office was closed and two days later it was truncated again because they still had not obtained the owner’s permission.
