New details are emerging relating to the death of Violet Evelyn Alberts , the 96-year-old Montecito woman found dead in her Park Lane home on May 27. According to her attorney at the time — Alfonso Arturo Flores — Alberts was killed by asphyxiation and had reportedly put up a fight. The consequences of that struggle made it evident that her death was not accidental or due to natural causes.
According to Flores, detectives were able to extract four separate DNA samples; two of those, he said, belonged to caregivers who tended to Alberts, who lived alone in her home. No next of kin have been found to notify either. No matches have reportedly been found. Investigators with the Sheriff’s Office have declined to discuss details of the case on the grounds it remains the subject of an ongoing investigation.
At the time of Alberts’s murder, she was engaged in litigation with a Porter Ranch real estate speculator named Pauline Macareno, who Flores charged had forged his client’s name on a title transfer on her Montecito home, valued anywhere from $4 to $11 million. It was Flores who reportedly blew the whistle on Macareno in March 2022. He was representing another client at the time in another county who was suing Macareno on real estate fraud charges. Flores’s investigator reportedly stumbled onto Macareno’s transaction with Alberts, and Alberts, he said, hired him. Flores charged that the signature on the deed documents that Macareno submitted to Santa Barbara’s clerk recorder did not match Alberts’s actual signature.