Print edition: 
A night out with friends turned deadly for Emily Sander, after she left a bar with a stranger.
The Butler Community College student met friends at a Chinese restaurant. Although only 18, she then went to a bar. She got drunk and was last seen by her friends kissing a man who had been buying them drinks all night.
Israel Mireles, 26, goes on trial this week in Butler County District Court charged with capital murder, rape and aggravated sodomy in Sander's death.
Although charged with capital
murder, Mireles won't face the death penalty if convicted, under an extradition agreement with Mexico, where he was arrested a month after Sander died in November 2007.
It has taken more than two years to bring the case to trial.
Most of that was working out details to bring Mireles back to Kansas from Mexico — an extradition process that took 18 months.
Jury selection begins today.
Sander's partially clothed body was found 20 feet over an embankment on U.S. 54 about 50 miles east of El Dorado.
An autopsy showed she had been stabbed multiple times, beaten and strangled with telephone cords.
Misty Walton testified at a preliminary hearing last summer that Mireles bought drinks for Sander and their group of friends at a Chinese restaurant before accompanying them to a bar called the Retreat, across from the El Dorado state prison.
Mireles, a Mexican citizen who was legally in the United States, had been a waiter at an Italian restaurant next to an El Dorado motel, where he stayed with a pregnant teenage girlfriend.
That week, the girlfriend was visiting family in Baxter Springs.
Mireles paid the women's cover charge at the Retreat, Walton testified. He bought more drinks.
Walton remembered Mireles trying to coax her back to his motel room, but she turned him down.
Later, Walton saw Mireles and Sander kissing.
The doorman at the Retreat saw the two leave together.
Sander said she'd be back. Her body was not found for five days.
A nurse said she had never seen such extensive injuries indicating a sexual assault.
Authorities followed a bloody trail of underwear, clothing and weapons from the motel where Mireles stayed to Baxter Springs.
The trail eventually led to Mexico.
