A 53-year-old woman accused of killing her wife, a Cal Fire captain, in her Ramona home last month pleaded not guilty Wednesday in El Cajon Superior Court.
Yolanda Olejniczak Marodi was arrested by Mexican authorities more than a month after she was accused of stabbing and slashing Rebecca Marodi, 49, at least 34 times on Feb. 17. Rebecca Marodi had been with Cal Fire for more than 30 years and was a captain at a station in French Valley in Riverside County.
Judge Peter Lynch ruled during the arraignment Wednesday that Yolanda Marodi would be held without the possibility of being released on bail, citing the “extreme violence” connected to the murder charge, the fact that the slaying was allegedly captured on video and that she had been previously convicted of manslaughter.
She faces a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
Yolanda Marodi appeared in court remotely from an off-site hospital bed with a breathing tube in her nose and her defense attorney standing by her side. The gallery was filled with the victim’s friends, colleagues and family.
It was not immediately clear why Marodi required hospitalization.
“This is a very tragic state of intimate partner violence,” Deputy District Attorney Maura Duffey said after the hearing. “The victim was a beloved member of the Cal Fire community, and I know that this loss is being felt in that community.”
The defense attorney representing Marodi could not be immediately reached for comment.
On the night of the killing, deputies received a call from Rebecca Marodi’s 77-year-old mother — who also lived at the house — reporting that she had come back to her daughter’s home on Rancho Villa Road around 9 p.m. and found her in a pool of blood, Duffey said in a request filed in court Wednesday requesting the denial of bail.
When deputies arrived, they found Rebecca Marodi suffering from nearly three dozen stab and defensive wounds, including injuries to her neck and at least one stab wound to her jugular, Duffey said in the court document.
Investigators later found a Ring camera on the back patio of the property that reportedly showed Yolanda chasing Rebecca and then stabbing her offscreen an hour earlier that night. Rebecca came back into the camera’s view holding her neck, bleeding, and told her wife that she did not want to die, investigators said.
Yolanda is heard on video telling Rebecca that she “should have thought of that” and to “get in the house,” the court document reads.
Prosecutors allege Yolanda is then seen loading her car with suitcases and her wife’s dogs and driving away before her mother-in-law or deputies arrived.
Yolanda Marodi’s license plate was scanned while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border into Mexico on Feb. 18.
Mexican authorities arrested Marodi on Sunday near a hotel in the Ferrocarril neighborhood of Mexicali after a binational five-week search, investigators said. She was handed over to U.S. Marshals and returned to San Diego County.
Previously, Marodi was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served 13 years in prison in connection with the stabbing death of her then-husband, James Joseph Olejniczak, in San Bernardino County in 2000.
A day after Olejniczak was found dead in his apartment from multiple stab wounds, Marodi returned from Mexico and turned herself in to law enforcement.
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