Panama sends American who killed to prison

PANAMACITY— American William Dathan Holbert was sentenced to 47 years in prison by a court in Panama for robbing and killing five other Americans in a Caribbean tourist destination, authorities said Monday.

Holbert’s ex-wife Laura Reese was sentenced to 26 years for her role.

Authorities said Holbert admitted killing five people between 2007 and 2010 in Bocas del Toro province in order to steal their property.

Holbert’s lawyer, Claudia Alvarado, suggested an appeal was likely.

Holbert and Reese were arrested while trying to enter Nicaragua from Costa Rica in 2010.

That year, the bodies of four adults and one child were found buried on the property of a hostel Holbert owned.

Holbert killed a U.S. citizen named Mike Brown, his wife and young son in 2007. In 2010, he killed Cheryl Lynn Hughes, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, and Bo Icelar, former owner of a Santa Fe, New Mexico, gallery.

Holbert had fled North Carolina where he had gone through a divorce from a previous wife, sold his landscaping business and filed for bankruptcy.

In Montana he stole a car and sold it. Back in North Carolina he sold a $200,000 home that he didn’t own. Authorities pursued him across a half-dozen states that included a high-speed chase in Wyoming.

He and Reese had been living in Panama.

They were fleeing a Panamanian investigation when they were arrested in Nicaragua.