McKINNEY – A Collin County jury has convicted a man of killing and butchering a woman last year after prosecutors said she refused to play a sex game with him.

Eric Ziegler, 34, was on trial in the brutal slaying last June of 20-year-old Ibonne Zamudio. He now faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Another man, Timothy Jones, 45, was also at the Richardson home at the time of the death. He is also accused of murder and awaiting trial.

According to testimony, the three were smoking crack cocaine in the home when Ziegler proposed a sex game to the young woman, who had a history of arrest for prostitution.

She was strangled, prosecutors said, after she rebuffed the advance. Her body was then butchered and stuffed into trash bags.

Prosecutor Scott Becker, in his closing argument, said Zamudio died because she had the misfortune of resembling a former girlfriend of Ziegler's -- down to her tattoos.

"There's anger in this crime," he told the jury. "There's the anger of jilted lover. There's a lot of rage."

Defense attorney Phillip Hayes sought to pin the blame for the murder on his client's co-defendant, Jones.

"Mr. Jones took her life," he said. "I wish I could give you an explanation for it, but I can't."

"It's disturbing," he said of the ghastly crime. "But what's more disturbing is convicting someone who didn't do it."

Earlier today, the defense called to the stand its only witness, Zamudio's sister, Janet Zamudio.

She testified that her sister had said she was afraid of a certain black man. Ibonne Zamudio never mentioned the man by name, Janet Zamudio said. Jones is black.

On Monday, the jury watched a videotape of Ziegler being interviewed by police. Prosecutors said the tape appeared to show Ziegler accidentally confessing to the strangling of Zamudio.

Through most of the interview, Ziegler maintained that Jones strangled Zamudio in a bathroom of the house.

But almost four hours into the five-hour interview, Ziegler seemed to blurt out the words, "when I walked in there, I started choking her again," indicating that he – not Jones – killed the woman.

Richardson police detective J. Farmer, who was questioning Ziegler in the taped interview, testified Monday that after Ziegler made that statement, "I walked out of the room and I thought to myself, he just confessed."

But under cross-examination by Hayes, the defense attorney, Farmer acknowledged that he did not make a written notation of the confession until a few weeks ago, when hew as preparing for Ziegler's trial. The detective also acknowledged that he never pressed Ziegler about what he had said.

Asked why, the detective said: "We still wanted him to talk to us."

At one point, Hayes used a computer program to slow down the speech on the tape, which was often hard to decipher. Hayes contends that Ziegler didn't admit to choking Zamudio, but rather said that he saw Jones "choking her again."