An Irvington man who left the body of a Bayou La Batre teenager floating in a Louisiana river in November 2005 will spend the rest of his life in prison, without parole.
That mandatory punishment will be handed down on Oct. 26 in the wake of Eric Joseph Buras' guilty plea to second-degree murder in St. Tammany Parish.
His victim, 19-year-old Katie Wilkerson, was found on Nov. 14, 2005, bound, gagged, partially clothed and wearing butterfly-shaped jewelry along a shallow portion of the Pearl River, just inside Louisiana near the Mississippi border.
Authorities said the teenager was strangled and drowned, and there were signs that she struggled with her killer.
Buras, 30, was arrested in Mobile County a few days later and charged with Wilkerson's murder.
St. Tammany Parish District Attorney spokesman Rick Wood said Tuesday that under Louisiana law, the confessed killer's life sentence is automatic and carries no possibility of parole.
Buras' guilty plea before District Judge William Crain came Monday evening, a little more than three months after he and three other inmates briefly escaped from the St. Tammany Parish Jail.
All of them were captured following a massive manhunt.
Buras' ex-wife, 24-year-old Claudia Buras, also of Irvington, was later charged with assisting an escape and introduction of contraband into a penal institution.
She slipped a Bible -- with hacksaw blades hidden in the book's spine -- to her husband in June, parish officials said.
Wood said Tuesday the cases against Claudia Buras are pending and that she will face a maximum of five years for each offense if convicted.
In 2002, a Louisiana jury acquitted Eric Buras of second-degree murder in the case of a 20-year-old waitress, found dead in a burned-out truck in Plaquemines Parish.
In Wilkerson's case, she was last heard from in a cell phone call to her family shortly before her body was found by a truck driver.
A family member later said that Wilkerson reported in the call that she was on her way to Slidell, La., with friends.