A Vacaville man who pleaded no contest to the murder of a 32-year-old woman he’d met online, and whose body he then burned near already raging wildfires in the summer of 2020, in an attempt to hide the crime, causing a separate wildfire, has just been sentenced.
The summer of 2020 was dismal already before a series of mostly lighting-caused wildfires began raging simultaneously both to the north and south of San Francisco, filling the air around the Bay with smoke for weeks on end, and claiming seven lives. Two of those lives were claimed by the Markley Fire in Solano and Napa counties, one of a group of fires that came to be known as the LNU Complex, and unlike most of the fires in the area its cause was determined to be arson.
About nine months after the fire, in April 2021, the Solano County Sheriff’s Office arrested a 29-year-old man suspected of setting the fire — and suspected of murdering 32-year-old Priscilla Castro, with the fire used as a coverup tactic…