SALINAS, California- Monterey County District Attorney Jeannine M. Pacioni announced on February 11 that on
February 10, 2026, a Monterey County jury found 44-year-old Noel Ledesma formerly a resident of
Soledad and Yuma, Ariz., guilty of the 2010 first-degree murder of Yvette Martinez.
In early 2010, Martinez and Ledesma dated, but they subsequently broke up. Despite the breakup,
they remained connected to each other. For months, Ledesma attempted to persuade Martinez to get
back together with him. However, in mid-September, Martinez began dating another person.
On October 9, 2010, Martinez went out with friends and her then-boyfriend. She went out drinking
in Salinas and then went to a corn maze with her boyfriend. She saw a different friend at a Salinas
restaurant before heading home. Throughout the night, Ledesma was calling and texting Martinez’s
cell phone, but she largely ignored his texts and calls. As the night progressed, Ledesma became
angrier that Martinez was not responding to him. He told her that his friends were ridiculing him
and laughing at him.
A little after midnight on October 10, 2010, Ledesma went to Martinez’s home in Greenfield and
waited there for hours. At 3:11 a.m., Martinez arrived back at her home but did not make it inside.
She was never seen alive again.
That morning, Martinez’s phone was disconnected from her cellular network for the whole day, the
only time in the prior six months her phone was ever meaningfully disconnected from the network.
For a brief period of time in the afternoon, Martinez’s phone reconnected to her network, and her
phone sent a few messages to friends that they suspected were not actually from Martinez.
Martinez’s friends and family tried calling her phone all day, but her phone would never answer,
despite the fact she was someone who was extremely responsive to cell phone contact.
At 8:00 p.m., Martinez’s vehicle was found burning on the side of Highway 198, a few miles from
Priest Valley Road, an extremely rural patch of highway. Martinez’s body was found in the trunk of
her own car. Someone had attempted to push her vehicle down a canyon, but the vehicle got stuck
on a berm. An autopsy determined that Martinez had died of strangulation. Her body was so
badly burned that she had to be identified by her dental records.
In 2010, Monterey County Sheriff’s Office detectives suspected Ledesma was the killer due to
suspicious behavior he exhibited in the days following her death, his history of domestic violence
against other partners, and the content of his text messages with Martinez that night. However,
Ledesma claimed he was home the day she disappeared and was at a family party when the car fire
was set. Ledesma’s brother vouched for his alibi. At the time, investigators were unable to disprove
the alibi.
In July 2020, District Attorney Jeannine M. Pacioni created the District Attorney’s Office Cold
Case Task Force, which represents the largest and most comprehensive county-wide effort to
investigate, solve and prosecute cold-case homicides in Monterey County. The Cold Case Task
Force has been actively collaborating with the Sheriff’s Office to work on multiple unsolved
homicide cases, including Martinez’s case.
In January 2022, the District Attorney’s Office Cold Case Task Force received a $535,000 grant
from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance. The
grant, titled “FY 2021 Prosecuting Cold Cases Using DNA,” provides funding to support forensic
testing and investigative activities in the prosecution of cold cases where DNA from a suspect has
been identified. Funding from the U.S. Department of Justice grant enabled the Cold Case Task
Force to seek justice in this case.
In 2024, using grant funding, the Task Force hired Jason Riechers of Hawks Consulting to re-
examine the cell phone data. Riechers was able to process the 2010 cellular data and provide
extremely powerful visual evidence that demonstrated Ledesma’s alibi was false. Riechers’s
analysis showed that Ledesma was at or near Martinez’s home in Greenfield for hours before she
arrived home. It showed Ledesma’s phone was in the same part of Salinas as Martinez’s cell phone
when her phone was briefly turned on to send messages to friends pretending to be her. The data
also showed that Ledesma was not at the family party at the time Martinez’s vehicle was found
burning.
Judge Jennifer O’Keefe will preside over the sentencing on March 12, 2026. Ledesma will receive a
mandatory sentence of 25 years to life in prison. The original homicide investigation was conducted
by multiple detectives from the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, with CAL FIRE Battalion Chief
Richard Lopez overseeing the arson investigation. The lead investigators since 2024 were District
Attorney Investigators Oliver Minnig, Justin Bell, and Bill Clark.
Since the creation of the Cold Case Task Force, seven defendants have been convicted of cold-case
murders at jury trial, and three defendants have pleaded guilty to cold-case murders. Three other
homicides were closed due to the death or mental incompetency of the identified suspect. Ten
previously unidentified decedents have also been identified through DNA testing.
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