Montecito Mortgage Scam Leads to Murder, Sheriff Alleges

Two years ago, sheriff’s deputies found 96-year-old Violet Evelyn Alberts strangled inside her hillside home in Montecito.

Last week, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department announced the arrest of three people charged in a murder-for-hire scheme and reverse-mortgage scam to seize her nearly 4-acre estate at 909 Park Lane, the Santa Barbara Independent and CNN reported.

Alberts was found dead in her bed by her caretaker inside her Montecito home on May 27, 2022, with a window next to her back door shattered. The ingredients for cookies she’d planned to bake for her upcoming birthday lay on a nearby table.

An autopsy found she’d died by asphyxiation and her death was ruled a homicide, according to Sheriff Bill Brown.

The case was shrouded in mystery as investigators pieced together “a tangled, evil web of financial exploitation against the victim,” Brown said in a news conference last week.

The scheme began in 2020 when the widow, who was in “a financially distressful situation,” was approached by Pauline Macareno, 48, of L.A.’s Porter Ranch, offering to sell her a reverse mortgage on her upscale estate, Brown said.

Macareno allegedly orchestrated a series of transactions that included forging documents and establishing fraudulent entities to illegally gain control over Alberts’ property, valued between $4 million and $11 million at the time of her murder.

Detectives then found evidence Alberts became the target of a murder-for-hire scheme, the sheriff said.

“Let me put it this way,” Brown said at the press conference. “In the eyes of Ms. Macareno, Miss Alberts was living too long.”

Three days before she was found dead, 41-year-old Ricardo MartinDelCampo of Los Angeles and 33-year-old Henry Rostomyan of Tujunga had gone on “a scouting trip” to Alberts’s home, according to the sheriff’s office.

Rostomyan was arrested last month and MartinDelCampo was arrested March 5. Both are now in the Santa Barbara County Jail without bail on charges of murder and conspiracy to murder Alberts, according to the sheriff’s office.

A third man, 58-year-old Harry Basmadjian of Van Nuys, was arrested in January for his alleged involvement in the conspiracy as he was held in federal custody in Los Angeles on an unrelated charge, according to a sheriff’s news release.

The investigation remains ongoing. CNN, which reached out to the Santa Barbara County Public Defender’s Office, couldn’t determine if any of the suspects had legal representation.

Macareno was arrested in June 2022 for fraud, elder abuse, and manipulation of legal documents, and has since been sentenced to six years in state prison for fraud related to Alberts’ case, according to the sheriff’s office.

She now also faces additional, unspecified charges, the sheriff said.

Alberts was a cherished figure in Montecito, where she’d moved from Beverly Hills after the death of her husband, David Alberts, in 1993, Brown said. But she was in a poor financial situation after she ran out of her savings and had been relying solely on Social Security.

Macareno “essentially took advantage of the victim,” Brown said, calling it a “particularly heinous case.”

“The victim was in a financially distressful situation where she had essentially aged out of her savings and she basically had a very valuable home that she lived in, but she had run out of money,” the sheriff said.

— Dana Bartholomew