Sixteen-year-old Maria Lena Ybanez had been living a less-than-ideal life in Davenport, Iowa with her foster parents, Kathryn and Bernie Ybanez, who in the summer of 1973 were undergoing a bitter divorce, as well as enduring the loss of Kathryn’s five-year-old niece, who had been hit by a car a short time previously.
Kathryn Ybanez had gone to Tennessee to be with her family after the tragedy, leaving Maria Lena, as well as her older brother Roger, in the care of their foster father.
By all accounts, Bernie was abusive to both Maria Lena and her brother, and Maria was also set to testify against him in her parents’ upcoming divorce proceedings. However, she would never get the chance to take the stand.
On Wednesday, June 13th, 1973, Maria Lena Ybanez left her house, apparently not intending to go far, since she hadn’t put on any shoes. She thereafter vanished without a trace.
Her story would not be concluded for four long years, and its horrifying aftermath would serve as a tragic tale of rape, murder and the continued cycle of abuse. On November 5th, 1977, two men hunting pheasants in a field near New Liberty, Iowa, stumbled across a set of skeletal remains, buried in a shallow grave. After comparing dental records and examining jewelry found with the bones, authorities eventually identified the body as that of sixteen-year-old Maria Lena Ybanez, who had vanished from her abusive home in June of 1973, shortly before she was scheduled to testify against her father in her parents’ divorce proceedings. An autopsy revealed that Maria had likely been strangled to death with a belt.
For obvious reasons, the teenager’s father Bernie Ybanez was the prime suspect in her murder. He was a known alcoholic, and reportedly beat his wife and children. He also allegedly sexually molested both Maria and her older brother Roger. Though family members and acquaintances of the Ybanezes had little doubt that Bernie was the culprit, investigators were never able to gather enough solid evidence to convict him, and he died a free man in 1999.
Distressingly, however, the effect of his abuse carried on into the next generation. His son Roger Ybanez later married a woman named Julie Toland, and the couple had a son named Nate, who both parents reportedly physically and sexually abused. When Nate was sixteen, in 1998, he and an accomplice killed his mother after she threatened to send him to military school. The litany of abuse Nate had endured at the hands of his parents was not revealed at his trial, and he was subsequently sentenced to life without parole in January of 2000.
The heartbreaking saga continues, and family members still hope to find some closure, if not justice, in the murder of Maria Ybanez.
Crime Immemorial 