EL DORADO, Kan.—After only four days of testimony, a jury took little more than one hour to find Israel Mireles guilty of raping and murdering Emily Sander, known to her fans as internet porn model Zoey Zane. As a condition of the extradition agreement that returned him to the U.S. to stand trial, Mireles, a citizen of Mexico, will not receive the death penalty for the capital crime. Instead, Butler County District Judge David Ricke is expected to sentence the 26-year-old to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
According to testimony, Mireles fled to Mexico in November 2007 after murdering Sander, 18, a student at Butler Community College in El Dorado, Kan. The jury seemed unconvinced by Mireles’ testimony that he wrestled with an unknown man over a drug deal gone bad before leaving the stranger with Sander in the motel room Mireles had occupied for about a month. When he returned after taking a drive “to cool down,” Sander’s mutilated body was alone in the blood-spattered room.
Mireles told the court that’s when he panicked and threw Zane’s body and the bloody knife evidently used to sodomize and then kill her into the trunk of his car. He disposed of the body along a highway about 50 miles from the murder scene and tossed the weapon in a trash bin at his pregnant girlfriend’s grandmother’s house in Baxter Springs, Kan. Mireles and his girlfriend immediately departed for Mexico, he testified, because he was afraid the police would try to pin the murder on him.
Sander’s nude, stabbed, strangled and beaten body was found six days later. Mireles was arrested in Mexico the following month.
He is scheduled to be sentenced March 31.
