HOUSTON — The woman convicted of killing Tejano music legend Selena Quintanilla-Perez has been denied parole after spending decades behind bars for fatally shooting the young singer at a Texas motel in 1995, the state’s parole board announced Thursday.
Yolanda Saldívar is serving a life sentence at the Patrick L. O’Daniel prison unit in Gatesville, Texas. A three-member panel of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to not release her. The panel said her case will be eligible to be reviewed again for parole in 2030.
The singer known to her fans as simply Selena was one of the first Mexican-Americans to make it into the mainstream music scene and was on the verge of crossing over into the English-language pop market when she was killed.
Saldívar founded Selena’s fan club and had been the manager of the singer’s clothing boutiques, Selena Etc., until she was fired in early March 1995 after money was discovered missing.
Selena a Corpus Christi native, was 23 years old when she was shot in the back with a .38-caliber revolver at a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi on March 31, 1995. She was able to run to the motel lobby where she collapsed, and she was pronounced dead at a hospital an hour later.
Motel employees testified that Selena named “Yolanda” in “room 158” as her attacker.
“I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to kill anybody,” a sobbing Saldívar said during a nine-hour standoff with police. She told police she had bought the .38-caliber revolver to kill herself.
More than 50,000 people lined up to view Selena’s body the day before she was laid to rest in Seaside Memorial Park on April 3, 1995, just 13 days before her 24th birthday.
Saldívar’s trial was moved to Houston because of the publicity surrounding the case. Saldívar testified that she had intended to kill herself during the confrontation with Selena, but that the gun misfired.
On October 23, 1995, a jury in Houston convicted Saldívar of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
While in prison, Saldívar — a former nurse — obtained her paralegal and associate degree in criminal justice and has filed several civil rights complaints alleging mistreatment by the state’s prison system, according to court records. She also helped other inmates to file petitions.
In court documents filed in 2016, Saldívar said she was being held in protective custody — meaning she was segregated from other inmates — because prison officials were concerned for her safety due to the “high profile” nature of her case. She filed several appeals of her conviction but all were rejected.
Selena — “the Queen of Tejano” — rose to stardom and won a Grammy during a Tejano music boom in the early 1990s. Her hits include “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom,” “Como la Flor,” “Amor Prohibido,” “No Me Queda Mas” and “Tu Solo Tu.”
“Dreaming of You,” her English-language crossover album released a few months after her death, topped the Billboard 200, and featured hits “I Could Fall in Love” and “Dreaming of You.” Jennifer Lopez played the singer in “Selena,” a 1997 biopic.
The Grammys awarded Selena a posthumous lifetime achievement award in 2021.
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