When Carmen Zulema del Giorgio de Venturini, known as Mema, collapsed and died in March 1979, her daughters did not accept that it was natural. They asked for an autopsy. Traces of alkaline cyanide were found in her organs, and the porter of her building told them he had seen her cousin, Yiya Murano, go into the apartment and come out carrying a paper and a small jar. Two other women who had died a few weeks earlier were exhumed, and cyanide was found in them too. What joined the three was Murano, and the money they had given her.
María de las Mercedes Bernardina Bolla Aponte, known as Yiya, was born in Corrientes on May 20, 1930, and in 1953 married a Buenos Aires lawyer, Antonio Murano, who died in 1985; her brother rose to general in the army. She lived in the Monserrat district and took money from friends and neighbors on the promise of multiplying it in the financial market, and by early 1979 she owed a great deal to women who wanted it back. She later boasted of some two hundred and fifty lovers.
The first to die was Nilda Gamba, a neighbor and friend in the same building, on February 11, 1979. By one account Murano offered to look after her when she fell ill after tea and gave her a second dose in the early hours; as an older woman, she was not autopsied. Lelia Formisano de Ayala, known as Chicha, a friend of Gamba who had also invested, died after a visit from Murano, and a funeral-home doctor, paid by Murano, certified a heart attack. Mema del Giorgio died in late March. Accounts of the exact dates of the last two deaths differ, some placing Formisano's on March 24 and del Giorgio's on March 29, others del Giorgio's on March 24, after a fall on the stairs of her building on Hipólito Yrigoyen Street. The poison was served in tea or in pastries; it was never settled which.
She was arrested at her home on Calle México on April 27, 1979. Investigators at the time talked of ten or more victims, though only three cases were ever brought. In 1980 she was found unconscious in the prison at Ezeiza and had a tumor removed from her head. In June 1982 the trial judge, Ángel Mercado, acquitted her of every charge for lack of proof, citing insurmountable doubts, and she went free. Three years later, on June 28, 1985, with the country's attention on the trial of the military juntas, the third chamber of the national criminal appeals court overturned the acquittal and sentenced her to life for three aggravated homicides by poisoning and for fraud. "I never invited anyone to eat," she said.
She petitioned year after year for a pardon, and President Carlos Menem reduced her sentence to twenty-five years. With the two-for-one rule that doubled pretrial detention, accounts put her time actually served at thirteen to sixteen years, in two spells, and give her release as 1993 or 1995. She then became a television personality, twice a guest at Mirtha Legrand's lunch table, where she brought pastries as a gift, and she never admitted anything. Her only son, Martín Murano, an actor and stuntman, wrote two books about the case, called her a perverse murderer, and said she had told him the poison had been in the tea bags.
She spent her last years in care homes in Caballito and then Belgrano, having lost her memory, and her family kept the press away. She died on April 26, 2014, a month before her eighty-fourth birthday; one report gives June 23. Her son said he was not told. She was buried in the Chacarita cemetery under a shortened name, so that no one would know it was her.