Police arrived at the crime scene after receiving a 911 call on the morning of October 25, 2010. Sue Ann Marcum, a 52-year-old accounting professor at American University, was found dead at the bottom of the stairs leading to the basement of her home in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington. That was the beginning of a case that took 15 years to solve, until on October 30 a jury in the United States found guilty of the second-degree murder of Marcum Jorge Rueda Landeros, a 56-year-old yoga instructor with whom the victim had a romantic and business relationship.
At first everything suggested a robbery gone wrong. According to the judicial report, the victim would have struggled with her attacker and her body would have suffered serious head trauma and signs of strangulation. But investigators had doubts because nearly all of the valuables were still in the house, including a diamond necklace she was wearing when she was found. The only thing missing was Marcum’s old Jeep Cherokee, which was no longer parked outside the residence when officers arrived.
The van was recovered about 12 hours later. DeAndrew Hamlin, a young man who was 18 at the time, had stolen it, lost control of the vehicle and crashed in pursuit of authorities. Hamlin’s DNA was present in the car, but police found no trace of him inside the house. On April 12, 2011, the boy admitted to stealing the Jeep, but said he knew nothing about the murder. The investigation seemed to have stopped six months after the crime.
The case took a turn that same month, when authorities said the alleged assault at Marcum’s home appeared to be a “mountain.” Although they didn’t make it public, agents had already found a paper trail pointing to Landeros as the prime suspect. It turns out that the two had opened an investment fund together with the victim’s money and a life insurance policy for 500,000 dollars (around 435,000 euros at current exchange rates), of which Landeros was the sole beneficiary. Investigators also identified traces of the yoga teacher’s DNA on the murder weapon, a bottle of tequila, present at the crime scene and on the victim’s body. In June 2011 the arrest warrant against him was made public.
By then, the accused had crossed the border and was living in Guadalajara (Mexico), where he had been hiding for more than a decade under a false identity. Landeros introduced himself as León Ferrara, a former stockbroker who had left everything to dedicate himself completely to yoga and poetry. He said he had no living relatives, spoke little about his past and lived on the bare minimum. According to his acquaintances, he never seemed interested in money. In the United States, however, he was one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives, a fact that was not revealed to the jurors to avoid it influencing the verdict.
Two versions of what happened clashed during the eight-day trial. Prosecutors said the suspect abused Marcum’s trust for years to keep his money and that he killed her when he could no longer use his relationship with her to his advantage. The authorities have put on the table several possible causes of the crime: that he killed her when he realized that he could not get more money from her, or because of an argument for financial reasons or to collect on the life insurance policy.
“The defendant and Sue struggled. The fight started upstairs in the house,” prosecutor Debbie Feinstein told jurors. The sequence of events presented by authorities is that Marcum tried to escape and ran down the stairs, but tripped. Also according to this version, Landeros cornered her, hit her with a bottle and then strangled her. To cover up the murder, the defendant faked a robbery. In the end, the prosecutor noted, the defendant took the Jeep to escape and abandoned it in Washington, where Hamlin, the man who later admitted to stealing the vehicle, found it.
Instead, Meghan Brennan, Landeros’ lawyer, argued that authorities acted badly and deliberately omitted evidence that didn’t fit their theory of what happened. In his arguments, he assured that his client was blamed because he was the “easier” target and that Hamlin’s possible role in the crime should have been better investigated.
“I’m innocent. I guess not of everything, but obviously yes of what they accuse me of,” Landeros said in a phone call to this newspaper a few days after he was arrested in Mexico in December 2022. In that interview he said the last time he saw Marcum was weeks before the murder and that authorities took the “everyday” problems he had with the victim out of context to blame him. During the trial, Landeros decided not to testify and delegated his defense to his lawyers.
The victim and Landeros met in 2005 and became friends a year later after Landeros, a Mexican-American citizen, gave her Spanish and yoga lessons. During the judicial process it was described in detail how the two became close over time, to the point that the man became Marcum’s confidant and romantic partner, so much so that he moved and taught in his home.
“She would have done anything for him,” Feinstein said at a news conference. The prosecutor said Marcum mortgaged his house and entrusted all his savings to Landeros, while he did not contribute a single dollar and used that money as he pleased to cover his own expenses. Authorities said in a statement that Marcum lost $312,000 during the two years they invested together, while Landeros made more than $250,000 at his expense.
Marcum taught at the business school for 11 years. Her students, friends and family remember her as a talented, caring and deeply dedicated person to others. “She was probably the best teacher we had,” Don Williamson, the victim’s former colleague at American University, says via video call.
A tax expert, Williamson says he met both in early 2008 after Marcum asked him for help because they were having trouble with tax authorities over a series of transactions that Landeros had not declared to authorities. “Whatever you do, don’t give this man money,” she advised her friend when they were alone.
The Prosecutor’s Office provided several emails in which the victim confessed her anguish and had differences with Landeros over the management of her assets. A letter from the U.S. Treasury was also presented informing Marcum that he owed $15 million in taxes and fines. “The person who is most successful in the eyes of others may be the same person who, behind closed doors, suffers from financial exploitation and physical abuse,” Feinstein told reporters.
Jorge Bátiz, a friend of the defendant, says by phone that the last time he spoke to Landeros was when he called him before he was extradited to the United States in 2023. “He told me, ‘I made a mistake, but I didn’t commit murder.'” He also recalls never speaking to him about Marcum in the five years they became friends. Bátiz confesses that he feels disappointed, but also that he still cannot conceive that the person he thought he knew was capable of such a crime. “I know León Ferrara, but I have no idea who Jorge Rueda Landeros is,” he says.
“At one point I thought they would never get this guy, which is why I was so surprised when they stopped him in 2022,” Williamson admits. Landeros was arrested without resistance in a joint Mexican-US operation at the age of 52, the same age Marcum was when she was murdered. Prosecutors in Montgomery County, Maryland, benefited from widespread media coverage of the case, especially in the United States. A person who saw a documentary on television recognized the fugitive and alerted the authorities. On the other side of the border, however, the arrest went virtually unnoticed.
After deliberating for eight hours, the jury unanimously decided that Landeros was the perpetrator of the crime, but did not convict him of the crime of first-degree murder, believing that there was insufficient evidence to prove that it was a premeditated act, that is, that he had had an elaborate plan to commit the crime. The defendant didn’t bat an eye when the sentence was read, according to reporters in the room. Sentencing is scheduled for February 6 and the maximum sentence is 30 years.
“It’s been 15 years,” Alan Marcum, the professor’s brother, said emotionally at the press conference after the trial. Despite the sense that justice has finally been served, many people in Marcum’s circle feel that the damage is irreparable. “Sue Marcum is gone forever and that can’t be undone,” Williamson laments.
