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Ami Mahler Salinas Davis first met Yolanda Mahlodi while playing for the same kickball team a few years ago.
One day in 2022 they spoke to her, and Yolanda learns that Ami has been on a bike and tells her that she must meet his wife, Rebecca Malody.
Yolanda Malodi, also known as Yolanda Oreziniczak, is a suspect in the death of his wife.
(San Diego County Sheriff’s Office)
“As soon as we met, we were locked up,” Ami said of Rebecca, 49, known as Beck or Becky. “We are very similar people. We both like to help people, and we both like to ride bikes. We are a tribal spirit.”
Ami, 37, and her wife, Aisha, 33, quickly became friends with the newly married Marodis. When Ami and Rebecca ride a motorcycle together, Aisha and 53-year-old Yolanda sometimes stay behind the garden.
For a while, the couple did everything together. They went to movies, camped, and even group chats.
“In the first and a half years there was nothing [suspicious]Ami said. “I’m glad I was with another couple who seemed like me and my wife.”
Then something changed midway through last year. Yolanda was diagnosed with lupus and the couple began to fall apart. Ami and Aisha thought Yolanda was too sick to socialize, and that Rebecca, the captain of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, was exhausted from her job.
As Aisha spends time with Yolanda, she will complain about how close Rebecca is to Ramona’s mother, who lived with the couple. Sometimes when Ami asks Rebecca if they’d ride a bike together, she says she needs to get permission from Yolanda as the couple often controlled the person they spent time with.
“…It was difficult because Yolanda was trying to isolate Beck because Beck was his mother’s sole caretaker,” Ami said.
At another time, Ami and Rebecca came up with the idea of running a small business together. Aisha recalls the moment she and Yolanda were alone in the car, and Yolanda told her.
“Why not?” asked Aisha. “It’s cool stuff that they can do and get out of the house so they can do it together.”
“Becky is just too cheating,” Yolanda said. “I don’t trust her.
Ultimately, Ami faced Rebecca about Yolanda’s “control, quarantine behavior,” she said. She told her friend that she was not as cheerful or extroverted as before. After their speech, Rebecca ceased consciousness about Yolanda.
Aisha said when she learned that Rebecca was stabbed and killed at the couple’s home on February 17th, she thought Yolanda had to be blamed. Authorities say Yolanda fled to Mexico on the night of the murder.
“I thought I could see her doing it from the crime of passion,” Aisha said. “The more I know, the less I understand what I thought I knew about her as a friend. I don’t know that person.”
According to the arrest warrant, Rebecca’s mother, Lorena Malody, said she notified Yolanda a week before the murder. In a home security video reviewed by the detective, Rebecca was seen running blood on her back from a woman believed to be Yolanda.
“Yolanda! Please…! I don’t want to die!” cried Rebecca, according to the warrant. Other women also had blood on their arms.
“You should have thought of that,” the woman replied while standing on Rebecca, holding a knife.
Detectives say this is the second time Yolanda Malody has killed her spouse.
In 2004, she was convicted of killing her then-husband, James Joseph Orezinikzak, according to court records. She pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter charges and was in prison from 2004 to 2013.
Yolanda did not reveal this to Ami and Aisha, always portraying herself as a victim of her story. She had mentioned her former girlfriend and her children, but there was never any details about her ex-husband or the fact that he had passed away.
“We had a lot of conversations about trauma, but it was always framed as if she was a survivor of a terrible relationship or a survivor of her upbringing,” Ami said.
Andrea Winter, 48, was Rebecca’s best friend for nearly a decade, but she also had no idea about Yolanda’s history. Rebecca knew that Winter would stand up to her about Yolanda’s red flag before Winter got married, so Rebecca never mentioned it to her.
“I’m a very straightforward shooter,” Winter said. “I would have called her very quickly for that. I would have asked, “What are you doing? What are you thinking?”
The relationship between Yolanda and Rebecca first moved rapidly, but this wasn’t unusual for Rebecca, Winter said. Yolanda seemed quiet and modest at first, but eventually began to trust Winter, and eventually signed the couple’s marriage certificate.
“If Yolanda didn’t like you, you wouldn’t have been going to interact with her or Becky,” Winter said. “She would have quickly cut you out of their lives.”
Winter suspects that she is one of the few people Yolanda has put in their inner circle, as Yolanda did not see her as a romantic threat. Winter is heterosexual and married to her husband.
Rebecca was a gay woman and had other friends she met through her previous relationship. After she and Yolanda began dating, Yolanda didn’t want Rebecca to spend more time with those friends, Winter said.
“Yolanda was very uneasy,” Winter said. “Becky had this magnetic personality and everyone liked her. Yolanda was very jealous of it and I think that Becky was this bright light.”
Rebecca tends to draw relationships towards “injured birds,” adding that Yolanda’s troubled history probably attracted her even further.
“Part of Becky’s professional life drips into her personal life,” Winter said. “In the workplace, she literally saved her life. I think she had a hard time distinguishing between them because she was drawn to a partner who needed repairs and a lot of help.”
Yolanda’s current location is unknown.
Former FBI profiler Greg McClary said people often go to familiar places when they are exposed to a lot of stress, and authorities will focus on people Yolanda knows in Mexico and where she hides.
McClary said officials should also consider that since this could be Yolanda’s second crime, she doesn’t want to go behind the bar for the rest of her life, so she might be at high risk of suicide.
“It’s more dangerous now because she’s going to be a lifelong prison sentence based on her previous conviction because she knows whether she’s back and found guilty,” he said. “She’s going to lose a lot, which increases the risk.”
Yolanda fled to Mexico with the couple’s two dogs, Winter said. Yolanda also had friends and family in southern Mexico. In recent years, Yolanda and Rebecca traveled to Tequila, Mexico, and traveled from their first marriage with Yolanda’s daughter. They brought Ami and Aisha a bottle of tequila back as a souvenir.
Winter regrets didn’t speak to me when Rebecca realized that she was beginning to change last year. Winter said when she invites the couple they will decline or cancel at the last minute. And, having been confiding in the winter about her marriage issues, Rebecca stopped communicating any further. Her calls and text messages were reduced, and the conversation gradually changed.
Winter thought it wasn’t her place to ask Rebecca about her marriage, but from now on, she said she would do things differently if she noticed that her friend’s social habits have changed, or if her partner is in control and jealous.
“Becky was a kind person and paid an absolute price for it by trusting the wrong person,” she said.
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