By Maverick
Welcome to the Maverick Files. In this first blog, we will be covering the docuseries that recently aired on the Oxygen network about the celebrity death of former Tejano music singer and icon, Selena Quintanilla-Perez, who died from a single gunshot wound to the back on March 31st, 1995. The two-part series aired on February 17th and 18th, 2024, diving into a myriad of controversial issues surrounding the death of this artist. It received a lot of negative reception because of who appeared in it for a sit-down interview.
For those of you who don’t know, Selena was an upcoming legend and household name, mainly in the Latin genre of music. Her life was cut tragically short on March 31st, 1995, at the age of just 23, by her former business manager overseeing her operations, Yolanda Saldivar. Saldivar has been serving a life sentence of 30 years for first-degree murder at the Patrick O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Texas, which is operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. She is eligible for parole on March 30th, 2025, which is a little more than a year away.
Until now, Yolanda has only given very few interviews, both in English and Spanish. Without further ado, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of the first episode titled “The Woman in the Red Truck,” which opens up playing archived news footage and sound bites from the official 911 call made by motel employees that day, to alert authorities that Selena had been shot. Yolanda’s audio exchange with the police during her nearly 9-hour standoff can also be heard, where she claimed she didn’t mean to do it and that her story would never be heard after the hostage negotiator Larry Young said, “You know, they always say there’s another side to the story.”
The lead prosecutor in Yolanda’s trial, Carlos Valdez, now a District judge, still claims to this day that this was a “simple case of murder, nothing more.” However, once you dive deep down the rabbit hole, it’s crystal clear that this is anything but a simple murder case, as there is a copious amount of anomalous evidence and contradictions from those heavily tied to this case. You also can’t expect the former lead prosecutor to want to find holes in his own case that he built, in order to get Yolanda convicted in the first place. Also note, this is the same case that boosted his career, gained him fame, to where he even wrote a book about it titled “Justice For Selena.”
At face value, it is very easy to believe that this murder was solely done by none other than Yolanda Saldivar, but once you do a deep dive into the case, there are many unanswered questions and anomalies that are present and have gone unnoticed for decades, which we will showcase here in future blogs and an upcoming film. We here at The Maverick Files truly feel this young lady, who lost her life for nothing, deserves at least some semblance of the truth out about how it is she came to die in the first place, even if the public does or doesn’t want to hear it.
We then meet Tina Saldivar, who was one of the managers at Selena’s then San Antonio boutique and is also Yolanda’s niece. She is now speaking out, saying that we haven’t been given the full story, and this wasn’t a simple case of murder by a disgruntled employee, because Yolanda’s late sister, Maria Elida Saldivar, kept a honey pot of documents in storage boxes since the case against Yolanda began all the way back in 1995. Most of this evidence hasn’t been seen publicly, and throughout the entire two episodes, I expected Tina to show a lot more, but she didn’t. It gives the audience some form of ambivalence, but not enough to vindicate Yolanda.
Tina proclaims that what the public has been told isn’t what happened in reality, so I will explain why that is. However, Martha Flores, a reporter for the news network Univision, made a valid point, saying that there were only two people in that motel room where the shooting happened, Selena and Yolanda. Only one is living, so only Yolanda truly knows what happened in that room. Everyone else can merely provide pure conjecture, making it more nuanced and ambiguous, but at the end of the day, there is only one truth.
The episode then shifts into the discussion about Yolanda, how she became the President of the Selena Y Los Dinos fan club in the early 90s, and how someone who was one of Selena’s closest friends and business managers could just suddenly take her life? The tabloid-derived narrative has always been that a deranged, jealous, and obsessed fan killed Selena. That’s the story that has been drilled into so many heads over the past 28 years, but it’s a lot more intricate than that, too much for the general public to digest.
About 13 minutes in, the episode finally shows an older Yolanda sitting on the other side of a glass window, ready to give her interview with the Director of this docuseries, in prison where she has served her sentence for the last 28 plus years. She claimed to want to “set the story straight” and people deserve “the truth” since so many years have passed.
Yolanda denied being an embezzler and an obsessed fan, which are the premises of the story that led to Selena’s death. She claimed she wasn’t given a fair trial and that she was deemed guilty, needing to prove her innocence instead of being innocent until proven guilty. I can concur with her on that, based on everything that I’ve looked at in terms of evidence. In the United States of America, it doesn’t matter if the accused is innocent or guilty; everyone deserves due process. That’s stipulated by the document on which this country was founded, the Constitution.
Yolanda pleaded how much she feels for the fans and those closest to Selena who were left heartbroken after she died. Many think it’s just a charade, an act she continues to put on, but I think anyone who spent nearly 30 years in the can would be all apologetic, especially since her appeals fell through and she’s eligible for parole in a year. Yolanda shifts the focus towards blaming Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla Jr., for things going south, for giving his own fabricated version of the story to continue to poison the minds of her fans.
Yolanda mentioned that her family was devastated, but despite being her family, they always believed there was more to the story since this all came out of left field, as Yolanda had never murdered anyone before, and Selena was her friend and employer. She claimed that her family had gathered all of her possessions and files to piece the puzzle together to figure out what the hell happened to ruin not one, but two lives on that gloomy Friday at the end of March 1995.
To be continued in “Selena and Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them” – Episode 1 Part 2…
