Juan Jose Figueroa Jr. pleaded guilty Friday to the murder of Rita Gutierrez-Garcia, a Longmont woman who vanished in 2018 and whose remains finally was located last month.
Under his plea agreement with Boulder County prosecutors, Figueroa had taped a confession to the murder of Gutierrez-Garcia and revealed to authorities where they could find her body.
Figueroa, 33, pleaded guilty in Boulder District Court to second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping.
He initially was indicted by a grand jury on counts of first-degree murder after deliberation, felony murder and second-degree kidnapping in the death of Gutierrez-Garcia, 34.
Figueroa already is serving a 93-year-to-life sentence in the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City on an unrelated sex assault conviction.
As part of the plea agreement in the Longmont murder, Figueroa will serve 48 years on the second-degree murder count, the maximum sentence on that charge, consecutive to his sex assault sentence.
Gutierrez-Garcia went missing after going out March 18, 2018, to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with friends and family at bars in downtown Longmont. She was last seen in a city parking lot behind 3’s Bar.
Figueroa was named as the primary suspect early in the case, but with no body, prosecutors were only able to present their investigation to a grand jury in April 2021 as a “no body homicide.”
According to the grand jury indictment, Figueroa was arrested March 27, 2018, in Texas on a warrant for the Boulder County sexual assault case after he was stopped by Customs and Border Patrol agents as he was crossing back into the U.S. from Mexico.
When Texas officials told him the warrant was for sexual assault and that he was likely to be extradited, the indictment states that Figueroa responded, “Thatap the only warrant? Thatap it? … Just sex assault? … Sweet, letap get this over and done with so I can get my bond, get it posted.”
The indictment also states Figueroa told a cellmate that he had strangled Gutierrez-Garcia after punching her into unconsciousness after she called him a “weirdo.” The indictment states he said her body was in “an area not accessible to the public.”
A separate witness testified before a grand jury that Figueroa said he had buried Gutierrez-Garcia’s body and that “the only way anyone would find it is if police inserted a probe into his brain,” according to the indictment.
The indictment also states that investigators found DNA evidence that confirms Gutierrez-Garcia was in Figueroa’s pickup truck. Cellphone data from early March 18, 2018, also shows that her cellphone traveled the same path as the pickup until the phone was turned off at 3:10 a.m., three minutes after Longmont police dispatchers received a hang-up 911 call. Dispatchers tried calling back twice but got no answer.
Following cooperation that was a condition of the plea agreement, Figueroa led investigators to search an area in Weld County, where Gutierrez-Garcia’s remains were recovered April 28.
