Olathe ? A former swimming pool maintenance worker was convicted Tuesday of killing a college student in 2002 at the northeast Kansas pool where she held a summer job.

Jurors in Johnson County District Court deliberated less than three hours before finding 31-year-old Benjamin Appleby guilty of capital murder and attempted rape. Appleby’s lawyers had rested their case earlier Tuesday without calling any witnesses.

Ali Kemp, 19, was found beaten and strangled on June 18, 2002, in the pump room of a Leawood community pool where she was working in the summer after her freshman year at Kansas State University.

Appleby, who had a pool maintenance business at the time, was arrested in November 2004 in Bantam, Conn., where he was living with his fiancee under an alias. Authorities tracked him there after receiving an anonymous tip.

Prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty, meaning the maximum sentence Appleby faces is life in prison with no chance of parole for 50 years. Sentencing was scheduled for Dec. 26.

On Monday, the jury watched a videotape of Appleby telling Leawood detectives he had gone to pool to check it out as a potential client. He said he found Kemp attractive and tried to “hit on her,” then “lost it” when she rebuffed his advance and swung at him.

“I killed her,” Appleby said on the tape. “I strangled her, I guess. I don’t know what I used. There was something laying there.”

Defense lawyers startled the courtroom when they acknowledged in opening statements last week that Appleby had killed Kemp but that the murder was not premeditated. They contended he believed Kemp was alive when he left her and that he should be convicted of a lesser charge than capital murder.

But District Attorney Paul Morrison, who takes office next month as Kansas’ newly elected attorney general, maintained that Appleby went into the pool’s pump room intending to have sex with Kemp. After she fought with him, Morrison said, Appleby beat and strangled Kemp.

Morrison argued that under Kansas law, the capital murder charge applied because the murder occurred during an attempted rape.