She was a beautiful 25-year-old aspiring dancer who came to the big city from Texas looking for excitement — and she stepped into every dating woman’s worst nightmare the minute she climbed into his car.
The 26-year-old son of a retired MTA deputy police chief yesterday finally came clean after three years and admitted to suffocating Laura Garza after picking her up in a Manhattan nightclub — and flying into a murderous rage when she got “loud” about wanting a ride home to Brooklyn.
“I realized that something very bad had happened,” date-straight-from-hell Michael Mele, 26, recalled in court as he described how he murdered the woman in his Orange County apartment Dec. 3, 2008.
“It happened very quickly.”
The killer said Garza “got upset” and wanted to go home after seeing a photo of his girlfriend and some of her belongings in his bachelor pad, unleashing his fury.
Mele’s chilling confession came as he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, as well to evidence-tampering for having dumped Garza’s corpse in rural Pennsylvania, where it remained undiscovered for 16 months.
His plea deal — which calls for a 23-year prison term when he is sentenced March 6 — came over the objections of Garza’s relatives, who were hoping he would begin a scheduled murder trial yesterday that could have ended with him behind bars for life.
“It’s not justice,” Garza’s brother, Ivan, who had spent months searching for his sister, told reporters in Orange County Superior Court in Goshen.
Garza’s mom, Elizabeth Esquivel, spoke in Spanish through a friend, who said: “She’s very upset. She’s not happy with 23 years. They wanted a jury to give him more. She’s worried he’ll get out in 23 years.”
In addition to knowing Mele would get the lighter sentence — which is likely to see him released in less than 20 years — Garza’s family had to listen as he revealed in excruciating detail his heinous excuse for slaying the pretty young woman.
Mele, a Quiznos sandwich-shop owner, told Judge Nicholas DeRosa he had met Garza for the first time at the Marquee nightclub in Chelsea on Dec. 3, 2008.
Garza had been living in New York for less than six months, having moved here from a Texas border town after falling in love with Manhattan during a weeklong vacation.
As for Mele, he was on probation for exposing himself to women.
Mele said he and Garza left the club together, with him driving her to his apartment in Wallkill about 70 miles away, arriving there between 5 and 6 a.m. The giggling pair shared kisses during the journey, said a pal who was in the car part of the time.
But later, “Laura was in my apartment, and she saw a picture of a girl and female-related items that were my girlfriend’s at the time, and she was upset by being there, knowing that I had a girlfriend, and she wanted to leave,” Mele said.
“I didn’t want to drive back then, and she became upset because I didn’t want to drive. She started to get a little louder, which, you know, she was perfectly fine being upset, and I tried to stop her from being loud.”
Asked how he did that, Mele responded matter-of-factly: “I put my hands over her mouth, and partially, her nose, and shortly after that she stopped yelling, she stopped moving.”
Grimmer asked: “You knew she couldn’t breathe, correct?”
“Yes,” Mele replied.
Then, “I panicked,” the monster admitted.
“Instead of calling 911, I decided to dispose of her body by myself.
“I put her in a laundry basket that I had, and I put a blanket over it,” Mele said, adding that he carried that basket out to his Infiniti SUV.
“I went to a location I’ve never been before, in Pennsylvania, and that’s where I placed her.”
Mele was almost immediately identified as the prime suspect in the case because he was fingered as having left Marquee with Garza and because he had torn up the carpet in his home.
But authorities never knew — or at least never disclosed — Garza’s exact cause of death. Prosecutors yesterday refused to say whether the lack of that evidence led them to cut the deal with the killer.
Mele eventually wound up in prison for three years because he had violated his sex-offender probation by traveling to Manhattan and failing to tell authorities he had a new apartment.
Lexi Lawson, who had been Mele’s junior-prom date, told The Post in December 2008 that, with all of his troubles with the law, she and his friends only “thought there was this strange stream of bad luck around him.”
“Now, looking back, it doesn’t seem this way,” Lawson said.
Until yesterday, Mele claimed to have had nothing to do with Garza’s disappearance, and her family was left to suffer the deep pain of not knowing what had happened to her.
“I sleep with the phone every night, waiting for her to call, to say, ‘Mom, I’m here,’ ” Garza’s mother told NBC’s “Today” show in May 2009.
But the case took a dramatic turn in April 2010, when a group of all-terrain vehicle riders came across Garza’s skeletal remains in the woods near Scranton, Pa.
Mele’s lawyer, John Ingrassia, told The Post that plea negotiations with prosecutors “heated up” Friday after a jury was selected and that Mele’s decision to plead guilty came after “a risk/reward” analysis that weighed the certainty of a 23-year sentence versus the risk of spending his life in prison if convicted at trial.
That trial would have included testimony from Mele’s girlfriend at the time of the killing, Lindsay Campbell, and her mom, Patricia, The Post has learned.
“I’m sorry he didn’t get life. I’m disappointed we didn’t go to trial. I was actually looking forward to testifying,” Patricia Campbell said. “I feel bad for [Garza’s] mom, from mom to mom.”
Patricia revealed that on Dec. 4, 2008, less than 36 hours after Garza vanished, Mele showed up at the Campbell house to talk to Lindsay.
Mele spent a long time in the bathroom washing up, leaving a large amount of leaves, she said.
“I thought, ‘What would he be doing in the woods?’ ” she said.
Additional reporting by Laurel Babcock and AP
Laura Garza (left) was suffocated to death by registered sex offender Michael Mele (right). (
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CHILLING: MIchael Mele said he used this Infiniti to transport the body of Laura Garza.. (
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The pair met at Marquee in Chelsea. (
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