A "vibrant" 96-year-old California woman was suffocated to death by a hired killer while making cookies, targeted in a plot orchestrated by a fraudster who stood to inherit her home, according to authorities and reports.

Officials in Santa Barbara County outlined their investigation on Thursday, nearly two years after Violet Evelyn Alberts was found dead in her Montecito home in May 2022.

"She was a vibrant, 96-year-old widow, a cherished figure in the Montecito community," Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said of Alberts.

In anticipation of her upcoming birthday, Alberts was making cookies when at least one assailant broke into her home, officials said. 

When investigators arrived on the scene, Alberts was dead in her bed, the ingredients still on the kitchen counter, Brown said.

Alberts' attorney, Alfonso Arturo Flores, told the Santa Barbara Independent in 2022 that the senior died by asphyxiation.

Over the course of more than 10,000 hours of investigation to date, detectives uncovered a "tangled, evil web of financial exploitation," Brown said.

At its center was Pauline Macareno, a 48-year-old Los Angeles real estate developer who in 2020 gained control of Alberts' financial holdings through fraud and forgery, Brown said.

But before long, Macareno grew impatient, Brown said.

"In the eyes of Pauline Macareno, Ms. Alberts was living too long," he said. "The acceleration of her death is presumably what was behind her murder."

Macareno was arrested in June 2022, later found guilty of fraud related to the case, and recently sentenced to six years in prison, Brown said. She has not been charged in Alberts' murder.

Since the start of 2024, investigators have arrested three additional suspects: Harry Basmadjian, 58, Ricardo MartinDelCampo, 41, and Henry Rostomyan, 33.

MartinDelCampo and Rostomyan are being held without bail on charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, Brown said. 

Basmadjian, who was already being held in federal custody on an unrelated case, was similarly charged, but has since suffered an unspecified medical emergency that has left him "totally incapacitated ... with a grim prognosis" Brown said.

It was not immediately clear whether the three men had entered pleas or had attorneys who could immediately address the charges.

Brown declined Thursday to specify how the three men were linked to Macareno.

Brown said it "remained to be seen" whether additional charges would be filed against Macareno.

The 47-year law-enforcement veteran hailed the work of investigators assigned to the case, saying that it was "the finest example I have ever seen of a 'whodunnit' murder with absolutely no information up front being solved due to the tenacious and unrelenting efforts of detectives."