Woman Shows Her Love and Appreciation for Her Wife, and Then Kills Her

About two years ago, I was posting articles on the now-defunct Fandom site, Real Life Villains Wiki, and of course, I was looking for some interesting real life villainesses to feature on the site. I remembered some from news reports I had heard over the years, a few featured on shows such as Snapped and Deadly Women, and a few I found via Google. Among the stories I looked into was this immensely surprising tale that hit the state of New Jersey back in May 2020, with a woman named Mayra Gavilanez-Alectus as the central villainess.

Mayra Gavilanez was born in Ecuador sometime in 1972, and at some point, she met Rebecca Alectus and became her wife, with Rebecca's Facebook page revealing that the couple became married on July 11, 2018. It was a May-December relationship; Mayra was 16 years Rebecca's senior, and it was (apparently) a happy marriage, with Mayra expressing her happiness and gratitude on May 10, 2020, which was Mother's Day. On Facebook, Mayra posted a loving and appreciative message thanking Rebecca for being her wife, adding that she was blessed to be married to Rebecca.

However, just a week after posting her loving message about her wife on Facebook, Mayra suddenly turned heel and bludgeoned Rebecca to death with a wine chiller. That is a very shocking and malevolent turn of events, going from a loving and appreciative wife to a violent and murderous villainess a week later. So what motivated Mayra's surprise heel turn? As it turned out, Rebecca was planning to leave Mayra, with reports stating that Rebecca was set on dating a man, making Mayra's actions a typical crime of passion. Police reported to the Gavilanez-Alectus home on the following day, finding Rebecca's body but no sign of her villainous wife. In fact, Mayra was nowhere in the state; she had escaped across several state lines and made it all the way to Houston, where federal agents captured the villainess and extradited her back to New Jersey.

On June 30, 2021, over a year later, Mayra Gavilanez-Alectus was indicted by a grand jury and officially charged with Rebecca's murder, as well unlawful possession of a weapon and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose. This story fascinated me when I first read it, and it still does, mainly because of the fact that Mayra went from 0 to 60 in her descent into madness. It also brings the phrase "appearances can be deceiving" to light, as there could have been problems in the marriage prior to Mayra's loving message about Rebecca. We also don't know if Mayra planned her wife's murder long beforehand, though I would think that her trial would reveal pretty much everything about Mayra, especially her true demeanor leading to her villainous actions.

Another fascinating trait about the story: it involves the LGBTQ+ community. The murder of Rebecca Gavilanez-Alectus at the hands of her own wife isn't the first such case I've heard of involving an LGBTQ+ couple, but it's one of very few, mainly because I never see such stories on TV. The fact that I had to Google to find it shows, IMO, a lack of diligence when it comes to LGBTQ+ stories, and I had to Google to find this additional story as well. This also happened in New Jersey; Laura Bluestein was married to Felicia Dormans for about a year, but on the evening of August 6, 2017, Laura suddenly shot Felicia to death in their bedroom.

The shooting occurred during an argument, which (according to reports) was one of many the couple had during their brief marriage. After shooting and killing Felicia, Laura phoned her father, Jason Bluestein about her wife's death, and later worked on her plan to cover up the murder. As part of the plan, the evil Laura bought a blue tarp and a pair of shovels from a local Lowe's store, as she planned to bury Rebecca in her front yard. Just as the villainess was digging her wife's makeshift grave, police arrived at the house and caught Laura in the act, while also finding Felicia's body. It was Jason Bluestein who phoned the police after talking to his daughter, who was arrested and charged with first-degree aggravated manslaughter. In August 2020, three years after the murder, Laura Bluestein was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison, with her parole eligibility coming after she serves 85% of her sentence.

In contrast to Mayra Gavilanez-Alectus' crime of passion murder, the actions of Laura Bluestein were the result of increasing toxicity in her marriage to Felicia Dormans. Couples who argue that much and come to no solution in anything really shouldn't be together anymore; sadly, that message didn't get through when it came to Laura and Felicia. Their brief and contentious marriage ended in murder, imprisonment, and two families forever connected together in tragedy.