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Michael Mele has admitted to killing Bay Ridgite Laura Garza — who went missing after leaving a Manhattan club in 2008.

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The sex felon suspected of killing Bay Ridge beauty Laura Garza pleaded guilty to her murder on Monday, moments before his murder trial was scheduled to start — an 11th hour, skin-saving plea deal that left the woman’s family reeling with shock and anger.

In a remorseless confession, Michael Mele said he smothered the 26-year-old aspiring dancer from Texas to death after picking her up at a Manhattan night club in 2008, then dumped her body in a remote area outside Scranton, PA.

Mele, 26, said he met Garza at the Marquee Club in Chelsea and later took her to his apartment in Wallkill, NY, where an argument ensued after she spied a photograph of him and his girlfriend.

“She wanted to leave. I didn’t want to drive back,” an unflinching Mele told an Orange County Court judge on Monday. “She started to get a little louder. I put my hand over her mouth and partially her nose, and shortly after that, she stopped yelling, stopped moving, and I realized something bad had happened.”

His actions took Garza’s life and destroyed her close-knit family, which spent years looking for the missing woman until her remains were discovered in 2010 by a group of teenagers on all-terrain vehicles.

Mele, a convicted sex offender on probation for masturbating in front of a group of girls at an upstate mall, was charged with killing Garza that December.

Garza had moved from the Lone Star State to an apartment on Shore Road near 93rd Street in Bay Ridge just weeks before she vanished. Investigators looking into her disappearance collected surveillance footage from the Marquee Club, which showed her reveling with Mele. Cops later learned that Mele and Garza left the club together at 4 am and were seen a few hours later inside his SUV.

Mele initially claimed he had nothing to do with Garza’s disappearance, although the circumstantial evidence suggested foul play: bloodstains were found inside Mele’s 2005 Infiniti FX35 and Mele had removed a piece of hallway carpet outside his apartment. Mele’s building super, who saw the suspect rooting around a dumpster in the back of the building around the time Garza disappeared, said Mele admitted to accidentally pouring bleach on the rug.

Mele pleaded guilty on the understanding that he would receive a 23-year prison sentence, meaning he would be sprung from jail before he turned 50. He faced 25 years to life if convicted by a jury — a prospect Garza’s outraged family wished he had faced.

“This is not justice,” Garza’s brother, Ivan, told reporters. “My mother and my brother Nicolas and I, we came to see the man and to see a jury.”

©2012 Community Newspaper Group