By
PE News on February 18, 2011 3:48 PM
More than five years after 22-year-old Maria Ines Lopez was found beaten, strangled, bound and buried in a creekbed off Highway 79 in Temecula, her ex-boyfriend has pleaded guilty to murdering her.
Gustavo Santiago Valencia Miranda, now 25, pleaded guilty today to first-degree murder to avoid facing the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Outside the courtroom at the Southwest Justice Center in French Valley, her father, Jorge Lopez, said the years of waiting for resolution in the case had taken a toll on his family.
"It was like a bad dream for us, waiting and waiting and waiting," he said.
Lopez, who lived with her parents in Long Beach and was a semester away from college graduation, broke up with Valencia Miranda a few months before she was killed in October 2005.
Valencia Miranda, a former Chaparral High School student who was 19 at the time of the killing, told investigators he had strangled Lopez while the two were walking together along the creek bed. He told them that Lopez had started talking about her new boyfriend. If she couldn't be with him, he told them, she couldn't be with anyone else, investigators said.
Valencia Miranda led authorities to where he had buried Lopez's body.
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