The woman serving a life sentence for the 1995 murder of Tejano icon Selena has filed paperwork to try to get released next year, as inmates tell The Post there’s “a bounty on her head” behind bars.
A rep at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said killer Yolanda Saldívar, now 64, has no blemishes on her record that will keep the parole board from holding a hearing in March to determine whether to release her.
Saldívar fatally shot 23-year-old superstar “Queen of Tejano” Selena Quintanilla-Perez on March 31, 1995, in a hotel room in Corpus Christi, Texas, during a confrontation.
Selena believed that Saldívar, a founder of her fan club, had embezzled more than $60,000, and the singer was planning to fire her.
According to the TDCJ, Selena’s family will likely get official notice in January of the Saldivar’s parole hearing.
The convict — who is at the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Texas, which also houses the women in the state on Death Row — has long maintained that she didn’t mean to kill Selena and that her death was accidental.
“I was convicted by public opinion even before my trial started,” Saldívar said in a prison interview for last year’s Peacock documentary: “Selena and Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them.”
She maintained that she had meant to kill herself, not Selena, at the time.
But a jury didn’t believe her and convicted her and slapped her with life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
A relative of Saldívar recently told the Post that the killer feels as if she is a “political prisoner” behind bars and that she believes she has paid her debt to society.
“Keeping her in prison isn’t going to do any good,” said the cousin. “It’s time for her to get out.”
Inmates at the prison where Saldivar is being held told The Post that she is constantly a target, forcing her to be housed in protective custody.
“Everyone knows who Yolanda Saldívar is,” says Marisol Lopez, who served time alongside her from 2017 to 2022. “There’s a bounty on her head, like everyone wants a piece of her. The guards keep her away from everyone else, because she’s hated so much. If she were out [in general population], someone would try to take her down.”
Another former inmate, Yesenia Dominguez, said Saldívar was always a common subject of discussion in the prison yard.
“Everyone was always like, ‘Let me have five minutes with that b—h,’” Dominguez says. “Everyone wanted to get justice for Selena. There’s a target on her back.”
In 2018, Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla, told Univision’s Primer Impacto that other inmates had been threatening Saldívar’s life.
“To this day, we still receive letters from women who are in the same prison where they say they are waiting for her,” he said at the time. “They say that they are going to kill her. There are bad women in there. Women who have murdered other people in the past. That is why they are in there. They have nothing to lose.”
Saldivar claims that she will live with relatives and find a job if she’s set free.
