A Florida attorney who tampered with a corpse requested disbarment from a Texas prison

Being convicted of tampering with a corpse tends to get a lawyer disbarred, so Nina Beltran aka Nina Marano saved the Florida Bar and state Supreme Court the trouble — she requested disciplinary revocation..

The state Supreme Court, which says disciplinary revocation is “tantamount to disbarment,” granted Beltran’s request on Nov. 14. She’d been a member of the Bar since 2012, two years after graduating from Brigham Young University’s law school. An arrest warrant said Beltran worked for Empire Law Group in Polk County at the time of her arrest.

Disciplinary revocation makes the professional discipline case go away while the lawyer is disbarred for at least five years. This doesn’t affect any criminal or civil consequences from the attorney’s actions, so Beltran remains in Plane Jail, a prison in Dayton, Texas. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, where she’s booked under “Nina Marano,” she’s scheduled for release on Jan. 10, 2026.

Conspiracy and murder in Dallas

Marano was captured in Miami-Dade after being on the run with her wife, Lisa Dykes aka Lisa Beltran, following the October 2021 murder in Dallas of Marisela Botello-Valadez, 23.

Prosecutors proved at trial that after Botello left a bar in Dallas’ Deep Ellum section with Charles Beltran, with whom Dykes and Marano were in a three-way relationship, Dykes stabbed Botello to death. Marano and Beltran helped hide Botello’s body, which wasn’t found until months later. Police say they traced Marano and Dykes cellphones to woods near a cement plant in the suburb of Hutchens.

By that point, Marano, Dykes and Beltran skedaddled. Marano wound up in Miami, where she’d be arrested on March 25, 2021. Dykes would be arrested up in Orange County around the same time. Eventually, Beltran was arrested, also.

Marano and Dykes posted bond and were under house arrest in Dallas. Trial testimony by the house arrest supervisor said on Christmas morning, 2021, Marano and Dykes cut off their ankle monitors to skip town and country, boarding a flight at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to Seoul, South Korea. The holiday falling on a Saturday gave them two days before the inactivity in their monitors was discovered. They would be recaptured in Cambodia.

Murder charges would be dropped against Marano and Beltran, who also pleaded guilty to tampering with evidence. He testified against Dykes and, with an unrelated robbery conviction, is scheduled to be in prison until April 21, 2027.

Dykes got sentenced to life after being convicted of murder and tampering with evidence. Marano didn’t testify against her.

“She just chose not to testify against her spouse,” Marano’s attorney, Valerie Baston said to Dallas’ Fox4News. “They’re still legally married… They’re not in communication with each other. I don’t believe there’s any animosity between the two.”

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Information from Miami Herald reporter Charles Rabin contributed to this report.