QCOSTARICA – The 11 defendants for the kidnapping and murder of American businessman William Creighton will face trial after a failed plea bargaining.
The Prosecutor’s Office against Drug Trafficking and Related Crimes had expected that most of the defendants to have accepted the charges in exchange for a lower sentence than they could get at trial.
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“During the beginning of the trial, some of the defendants asked that the possibility of agreeing to a special abbreviated procedure, however, no agreement was reached, so the trial was resumed this Tuesday with the reading of the accusation,” said the Ministerio Publico in a statement.
According to said statement, only one of the defendants, surnamed Ford Dowman, said he was willing to accept the charges and receive a sentence of 31 years and four months.
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Accused of the kidnapping and death of Creighton, who owned an online sportsbook called 5Dimes, the alleged leader of the gang, a computer scientist and lawyer with the last names Morales Vega; his grandmother, named Aguirre Leal, 74; a man named Vega Aguirre, 49; the lawyer’s mother, a woman named Vega Aguirre and another woman named Solís Chaves (27 years old).
To these are added four men surnamed Martínez Chacón, Sánchez Gamboa, Jirón López and Medrano Vargas (the latter two were traffic officals) and a woman with the surnames Sanabria Abarca.
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Creighton was last seen in September 2018 and his body was found in September 2019 in an unmarked niche in the Quepos cemetery thanks to confidential information.
According to the authorities, the gang planned the kidnapping and subsequent murder of the American with the aim of collecting a million dollars from his relatives.
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The trial, in this case, will continue on Thursday and is expected to end on September 30.
Read all our reports on the William Creighton case here.
