Maria de las Mercedes Bernardina Bolla Aponte de Murano, known as Yiya, was born in Buenos Aires on August 26, 1930. She was a well-dressed, socially ambitious woman in the Monserrat district who ran an informal lending scheme among her circle, taking money from friends and neighbours on the promise of high returns.
The scheme failed, and in 1979 three of the women who had put money in died within weeks of each other after taking cake or tea from her: her cousin Carmen Zulema del Giorgio de Ramirez, her friend Nilda Gamba, and Lelia Formisano de Ayala. All three had been pressing her to repay. Post-mortems found cyanide.
She was arrested in 1979, and the trial became one of the great Argentine media events of the period, in part because of her composure and her clothes. She was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to life.
She served sixteen years and was released in 1995. She never admitted any of it, gave interviews for decades, appeared on television, and sued over portrayals of her. She died in Buenos Aires on July 27, 2014, aged eighty-three, still denying it.