On October 1, 2016, police arrested Katherine Magbanua; she too was charged with murder. On October 4, 2016, Luis Rivera pled guilty to the charge of murder as part of a plea bargain in which he was sentenced to 19 years in prison, which would run concurrently with another sentence he was already serving. In his confession, Rivera claimed that Sigfredo Garcia had recruited Rivera to take part in the killing of Markel and that Katherine Magbanua was "the woman in the middle doing everything." Rivera also claimed that he did not know the names of the people who had hired Garcia and Magbanua but that the reason for the killing was "because the lady wants her two kids back. She wants full custody of the kids."