A killer who admitted to murdering and hacking up his girlfriend in Brooklyn was sentenced to 25 years to life behind bars — but not before insisting that his spontaneous confession, four years after the slaying, was somehow coerced.
Ricky Gonzalez, 39, learned his fate Wednesday after making a motion to set aside a Brooklyn Supreme Court jury’s guilty verdict. But Judge Danny Chun rejected his request, saying his claims of a coerced confession “does not make any sense.”
The Beacon, N.Y.-resident walked into the 1st Precinct station house in Lower Manhattan on Aug. 28, 2018, with a jaw-dropping confession — that he killed 58-year-old Maria Quinones on March 5, 2014 inside her Bushwick home, chopped off her head, hands and feet.
He then put her remains into garbage bags, which he put out on the curb for trash pickup, according to prosecutors.
“The defendant came in to confess this crime. No one was even looking for him,” Chun said. “When you walked in by yourself to Manhattan, you confessed to the crime, they chased you to go away. They told you to go away. You didn’t leave. You stayed there for hours and you confessed.”
The case would have remained unsolved if not for his confession, the judge said.
“You killed the one and only person that cared for you and the one and only person that loved you. She took you in,” Chun said. “Not only did you kill that person, chopped her up into little pieces, threw her into the garbage bag, threw her away, not only that, but for several years, every month… you took her benefit payments.”
He ended up collecting $68,000 in total. Quinones’s sister reported her missing in September 2014 after she hadn’t heard from the victim for a while.
Quinones’ body was never found.
Gonzalez insisted he had evidence on his seized cell phone that would prove his innocence and interrupted Chun several times during the sentencing to profess his innocence.
“Your honor, there’s no evidence that I killed her. There’s no murder weapon, murder scene. There’s no video footage of me going to any ATMs taking money out,” he said, later interjecting, “Your honor, I was forced to confess to this killing by individuals who she was related to.”
A jury convicted Gonzalez on April 3 of murder, tampering with physical evidence, grand larceny, identity theft and criminal possession of stolen property.
His lawyer, Samuel Karlinger, said after the sentencing that his confession was the product of his drug addiction.
“He’s a lifelong drug user whose brain has been severely compromised by a life of drug use,” Karlinger said. “I think what he said to the police was not reality, it was more a delusional psychosis.”