On the night of October 27, 2020 Lissa Maria Caiza poisoned her two children, aged nine and five, in a flat she rented in Pifo, a rural parish in the north east of Quito. She telephoned the children’s father to say she had written him a letter and would be taking what was hers, meaning them. At two in the morning she called him again to ask for help, saying she felt ill after swallowing a toxic substance. An hour later a police officer told him to come to Pifo. Firefighters had found Caiza close to death; the children were found dead on the bed at first light.
Officers searching the flat found a third body. Jaime Yanchaguano, twenty-eight, had been pushed under the bathroom sink, wrapped in blankets and already decomposing. His family had reported him missing and had been receiving telephone calls and text messages demanding eight thousand dollars for his return, saying he had been kidnapped. Prosecutors said Caiza had orchestrated those demands herself. She said nothing throughout the case; the fingerprint comparisons on the two blankets that wrapped the body were what the prosecution relied on. He had been asphyxiated, probably after ingesting a substance first.
She was tried first for the children. Her defence argued that they had died of Covid-19, an illness both had already had and recovered from, and the prosecution’s expert evidence ruled it out. The psychological assessment found no disorder and reported that she was oriented in time and place when she acted. She denied killing them. On August 3, 2021 the Tribunal de Garantias Penales de Pichincha convicted her of murder and sentenced her to thirty-four years and eight months, with twenty thousand dollars in reparation to the children’s father. The prosecutor, Elba Garzon, had asked for the aggravated maximum.
The Yanchaguano trial followed in April 2022 and produced a further twenty-two years. His family’s lawyer said the defence had argued there was no direct witness and no sufficient basis for a murder conviction, and that the investigation by three Dinased officers had established otherwise. A forensic psychologist told the court that the intention had been to frighten the family into paying rather than to kill, and described the killing as disorganised.
Two other deaths in and around the same parish in 2020 were attributed to her in the press and investigated by the prosecution service without producing a charge. Marco Escanta, forty-eight, was found dead at Florida de Chantag in Pifo in June 2020. Jose Luis Erazo was found at Checa, also north east of Quito, in May; his death was initially recorded as a heart attack. Reporting at the time also credited her with the attempted poisoning of at least ten other people in Pifo. None of that has produced a conviction and none of it is counted here.
Her appeal and cassation against the first sentence were both rejected and the conviction ratified. In January 2026 her lawyers filed again, this time not against the prison term but against the twenty thousand dollars. She is held at the Centro de Rehabilitacion Social de Latacunga in Cotopaxi.