Two years to the day that Denise Pikka Thiem was last seen alive during her trip of a lifetime hiking the Camino de Santiago in Spain, a jury in the northern city of León has found Miguel Ángel Muñoz guilty of her murder.

On Wednesday, eight out of nine jury members agreed with prosecutors that Muñoz, who lived alone in a house near the pilgrimage route, had “brutally beaten the pilgrim with a stick causing her death before proceeding to bury her body”.

Muñoz, who at 41 is the same age as the victim when she was killed, refused to testify at the trial.

But he had confessed to murdering Ms Thiem before the examining magistrate who ran the investigation after leading police to the place where he buried his victim.

Ms Thiem, from Arizona, was walking alone to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Spain after watching The Way, a Martin Sheen film about the pilgrimage.

Ms Thiem's disappearance in April 2015 gained a high political profile, with US Senator John McCain asking Spain’s prime minister Mariano Rajoy to speed up the investigation and offering help from the FBI.