Remembering Our Dead

Paola Matos

Paola was fund dead in her home by her boyfriend with a cord wrapped around her throat.

Paola had only recently moved to New York after having surgery abroad. She was discovered in her home by her live-in boyfriend with a white cord wrapped around her throat.

Police ruled her death a homicide. In December 2004, Wanda Batista was acquitted of her murder.

“The motive was money,” a law-enforcement source told The Post of the 2004 case. “They went there to rob her and ended up killing her,” the source said of victim Paola Matos, 31, a post-op transsexual who was found dead in the bedroom of her Bay Ridge apartment brothel.

“Police believed she was the killer — just the jury didn’t believe it,” the source said of Batista, who was a 24-year-old admitted prostitute at the time she was charged with choking Matos with her hands in a dispute over $4,000 Batista had allegedly made turning tricks but had failed to turn over to the doomed madam.

Batista fled to Puerto Rico after the killing, but was arrested there and brought back for trial, the source said. Jurors acquitted her of murder but hung on a charge of manslaughter. The case was not retried.

https://nypost.com/2012/12/17/bravests-new-squeeze-strangle-case-transgal/

Report added: 22 Dec 2018. Last updated: 13 Jan 2021

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