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Emily Sander kept her twilight activities a closely guarded secret.
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Even those closest to her had no idea the Butler Community College student in cosmopolitan El Dorado, Kan., (pop. 12,865) had a raunchy side gig when things went nocturnal.
The 18-year-old would transform herself from a cornfed Midwestern farm girl into a pornographic sex kitten named Zoey Zane. She also worked as a secretary while attending college.
Pals later said the wholesome teen had been recruited into the porn world in the summer of 2007, not long after she turned 18. Only a couple of her closest friends knew about her job in America’s digital red light district.
Sander’s secret smut career might have remained a closely guarded secret if she hadn’t disappeared.
On Nov. 23, 2007, Sander was out bar-hopping with pals.
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“She seemed happy. … She just said she would be back. She seemed all right,” Tommy Juarez, the doorman who checked identifications at the bar, later said.
Classmate Aurelia Resa told reporters that her friend confessed to having a website. While there was a block in Kansas, there was a way around it.
Even after Sander disappeared, Resa was reluctant to inform detectives about the clandestine capers of Zoey Zane.
“I cut the conversation off short because I didn’t feel it was anybody’s business,” Resa said.
What she did tell detectives was that Sander left the watering hole with a 26-year-old Mexican man named Israel Mireles.
Indravadan Patel, the owner of the motel where Mireles was staying, said he entered his guest’s room after discovering a torn screen and broken window.
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Inside the room was a horror show. Patel said that the carpet, bed and walls were covered with “a lot of blood” on the carpet, bed and walls.
Now, cops were searching for Sander — and Mireles — in earnest. Her battered, nude body was discovered about six days later, 80 km east of El Dorado.
Sander had been stabbed in the chest and her face beaten beyond recognition. The autopsy revealed that she had been raped and sodomized. Cops called the murder “massive overkill.”
The suspected killer was in the wind and detectives suspected he was making a run for the Rio Grande and home to Mexico, where he could get help and blend in.
Investigators learned that Mireles had picked up his pregnant, 16-year-old girlfriend at her grandmother’s house before he headed to Mexico.
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By this time, Sander’s secret career began emerging in the national media, adding a titillating touch. But authorities were quick to torpedo any connection to pornography as the motive behind the slaying.
Friends and family were angry that the media had blown her sex-rated career out of all proportion. They noted that her Zoey Zane website received far more traffic after she died than it ever did when she was alive.
The U.S. Marshals finally caught up to the killer in December 2007 at a relative’s home in Mexico, where he was hiding. To have Mireles extradited to Kansas, the U.S. had to take the death penalty off the table.
Mireles was charged with capital murder, rape and aggravated criminal sodomy.
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The way the suspect told the tale was that he and Sander went back to his hotel room where they knocked back some beers and had sex. Mireles claimed that a mystery man arrived at the room and the two males fought over a soured drug deal.
Mireles said he split and when he returned, Sander was dead.
During his 2010 capital murder trial, Mireles struggled to explain a bloody knife (that had Sander’s blood on it) and clothes that detectives had recovered from the home of his teenage girlfriend’s grandmother. The district attorney also asked why, if he had done nothing wrong, did he dump Sander’s body?
The prosecutor asked: “Does that make any sense to you?”
Mireles replied: “None of this makes any sense to me.”
Judge David Ricke slammed the killer as “inhumane.”
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He said: “The disrespect in which you treated Emily Sander … was and is appalling.”
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Clem Sander, Emily’s grandfather, said the family was happy that the death penalty was not considered. “It would have been too quick for him.”
As the 2010 trial drew to an end, Mireles was like a stone, utterly devoid of emotion.
Given a chance to speak, Mireles told the court: “I have nothing to say.”
Mireles was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. He may have escaped the death penalty, but that has little consolation for the killer.
Mireles might just as well be dead.
X: @HunterTOSun
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