Giselle Esteban, the one-time BFF of murdered nursing student Michele Le, was convicted in October of first-degree murder in the killing of her friend. Her defense attorney had never tried to deny the murder, for which there was abundant circumstantial and physical evidence, but tried to argue that her client killed her friend in the heat of passion and did not deserve a first-degree conviction. This morning, an Alameda County judge sentenced the 29-year-old to 25 year to life.
Le, as you probably recall, disappeared in May, 2011, and a search for her remains went on for four months, while her family tried to maintain hope that she would be found. Her body was ultimately found in a ravine on the Sunol-Pleasanton border, badly decomposed, on September 17, 2011, just days after Esteban was arrested and charged with murder based on DNA and cell phone evidence.
According to transcripts from an earlier grand jury hearing, Esteban's plot to kill Le went on for weeks, with many records of threatening text messages to ex-boyfriend and baby daddy Scott Marasigan (who she believed was obsessed with Le after the two had briefly dated). She threatened that "punishment [would] be swift" if Marasigan didn't stop seeing Le, and she called Samuel Merritt University in order to find Le's class schedule. Finally, one night while Le was in class during a clinical rotation at Kaiser Medical Center in Hayward, Esteban summoned Le to the parking garage where she killed her, put her body in the trunk, and drove out to the Niles Canyon area to dispose of the body. She then made some attempts to throw people off her trail by texting things from Le's phone like "Off to Reno" (Le had a trip planned the weekend she disappeared, "and then planting Le's phone in Marasigan's car, where he later found it.
Esteban and Marasigan have a seven-year-old daughter together, and last year while in custody Esteban gave birth to a second child, whose father was never made public.
[NBC]
