By Blake Schmidt
Tico Times Staff | bschmidt@ticotimes.net

Public defender Luis Fernando Burgos was sentenced to 35 years in prison yesterday for murdering his wife Maureen Hidalgo.

In a dramatic verdict reading that drew a packed, sweaty crowd to the courtroom in downtown San José, former state prosecutor Zulay Rojas was also sentenced to two years for failing to report Burgos' murder confession. But judges reduced the sentence of Rojas, who is also Burgos' ex-girlfriend, to a five-year probation period.

The three presiding judges in the case based their decision on the testimony of two key witnesses – one of them Rojas – who testified that Burgos had confessed the murder to them, as well as other testimonial evidence and phone records investigators seized showing who Burgos called before and after the murder.

Prosecutors faced a case with no physical evidence and an inconclusive autopsy since Burgos apparently covered up his tracks after the murder, leaving no evidence in his apartment where he kept his strangled wife's body for two days before disposing of it.

Still, the defense failed to discredit the testimonies of the prosecution's key witnesses, including Rojas and Antonio Calderón, said judge María de los Ángeles Arana.

“There was nothing about the characteristics of witnesses who supported (Rojas' testimony against Burgos ) that showed they were interested in harming Burgos,” she said as she read part of the hour-long verdict to a standing-room-only crowd, explaining that Hidalgo had long been a victim of Burgos' domestic violence.

Family, friends and acquaintances of those involved in the case, press and curious Costa Ricans started filling the courtroom three hours before the verdict reading. The crowd ended up packing the courtroom, the hall leading to the courtroom and spilling out onto the sidewalk in front of the court.

Burgos reported the disappearance of his wife July 13, 2006, two days after she was last seen (TT, July 21, 2006). Two hours after Burgos made his report, Chief Prosecutor Francisco Dall'Anese received an anonymous call from someone (later revealed to have been judge Elizabeth Tossi) who had received a tip that Burgos was the murderer.

Five days after the murder, a man riding his bike noticed some low-flying vultures circling Hidalgo's rotting body just off the highway in Atenas, a coffee town northwest of San José.

Burgos was also ordered to pay $350,000 in damages to Hidalgo's family, whom he “tortured” for days after the murder by leading them on to believe that Hidalgo could still be alive, said judge Ana Patricia Araya.