The case against Jorge Rueda Landeros took prosecutors from a staged burglary scene in Bethesda to a yearslong search that ended in Mexico.

ROCKVILLE, Md. — A Maryland judge sentenced Jorge Rueda Landeros to 25 years in prison on March 3, nearly 16 years after prosecutors said he beat and strangled American University professor Sue Ann Marcum inside her Bethesda home and fled the country.

The sentence brought a formal end to the trial phase of one of Montgomery County’s longest-running homicide cases. Marcum, 52, was a widely known accounting professor and director of American University’s master’s in accounting program. Prosecutors said her killer was not a stranger but a man she had trusted as a Spanish teacher, yoga instructor and romantic partner. The case turned on DNA, cross-border police work and a slow legal path that stretched from a 2010 homicide to a 2025 conviction and a 2026 sentencing.

The crime was discovered on Oct. 25, 2010, when Marcum was found dead in her home in the 6200 block of Massachusetts Avenue in Bethesda. The medical examiner later determined that she died from blunt force trauma and asphyxiation. At first, the house appeared to show signs of a burglary. Some valuables were missing, and investigators said entry seemed to have been made through a rear window. But detectives later concluded the break-in had been staged. As the investigation deepened, police focused on Marcum’s private life and financial dealings. Prosecutors said Marcum had been in a personal and business relationship with Landeros, who had taught her Spanish and yoga. In court and after sentencing, Alan Marcum, her brother, said the family had spent years waiting for the criminal case to catch up with what they believed happened in that house.

Investigators said emails and financial records helped explain why the relationship had become strained before the killing. In one 2008 message presented in reporting after the sentence, Marcum wrote that she could not stop thinking about money she said had been spent without remorse. Prosecutors said the two had entered investment arrangements using Marcum’s funds and that over about two years she lost $312,000 while Landeros gained $252,000. Reporting on the case also said he made himself the sole beneficiary of a $500,000 life insurance policy. Detectives recovered DNA at the scene from someone other than Marcum, then reviewed her communications and linked the unknown sample to Landeros. Authorities learned he had crossed the U.S. border from Mexico days before the killing and that a cheek swab taken during one of his border crossings became a critical piece of the case. In April 2011, police said the crime scene DNA identified him as a suspect, and an arrest warrant followed.

By then, prosecutors said, Landeros was gone. Montgomery County police later said he had fled to Mexico, and investigators eventually learned he was living under a new identity. The gap between the warrant and an arrest became one of the most striking features of the case. County officials said he was taken into custody in December 2022 in a joint operation involving U.S. and Mexican authorities, and Montgomery County announced in July 2023 that he had been extradited to Maryland. The trial itself would still take time. A Montgomery County jury convicted Landeros of second-degree murder on Oct. 30, 2025, after an eight-day trial before Judge Rachel McGuckian. Prosecutors had charged first-degree murder after the 2011 warrant, but the jury returned the lesser conviction. The sentence of 25 years left room below the 30-year maximum for second-degree murder in Maryland, but it also marked the first prison punishment in a case that had lingered for more than a decade.

The hearing in Rockville also turned into a public portrait of Marcum’s life beyond the case file. Family members and friends described a teacher who made accounting vivid and human. Alan Marcum told reporters that his sister once used a red clown nose in class while explaining how to think about elephant depreciation after her earlier work with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He said she cared more about students than about the subject itself, and he called that the sign of a great teacher. Her friend Larry March said Marcum had recently moved into a new home and was trying to begin again. “She was kind of starting her life over again,” he said after the sentencing, “and then she was snuffed away from the Earth.” American University has continued to memorialize her through a scholarship fund and remembrance materials that describe her as a mentor, colleague and friend.

The case now stands in a narrower place, legally and emotionally. Landeros has been convicted and sentenced, and the prosecution stage in Montgomery County has ended unless further court action follows. For Marcum’s family, the next milestone is not another verdict but the passing of time after one finally arrived. For the university community, the memory of a professor killed at home in 2010 remains tied to a case that moved from an apparently staged burglary to a cross-border manhunt and, at last, to a sentence pronounced on March 3.

Author note: Last updated March 31, 2026.