The number was eleven.
After thirteen murder pleas, the sentencing announcement reported eleven consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, another life term for kidnapping to commit robbery, and eight years for weapon enhancements. I stopped over the difference between the murder count and the arrangement of the punishment. Simplifying the sentence into thirteen identical consecutive terms would have made an easier line and an inaccurate one.
The prosecution's sentencing memorandum helped explain why the historical dates still mattered at the end. It addressed the law applicable when particular offenses were committed and the way some terms would run concurrently. The Snelling murder in 1975 and the Maggiore murders in 1978 did not occupy the same statutory position as the later offenses. The memorandum proposed an aggregate sentence; it was a submission asking the court to act, not the court's signed judgment.
The later announcement reported the result on August 21, 2020. Its components matched the aggregate described in the prosecution's submission. The reported sentence followed the guilty pleas and the opportunity for people affected by the crimes to describe their impact.
The older dates had carried several meanings through the story. At first they marked attacks and losses. Later they organized the work of connecting evidence. Within the complaint they identified charged events. At sentencing they could affect the law under which a term was calculated. Time had shaped the case in ways more specific than the simple fact that resolution took decades.
The reported outcome did not erase a murder because part of a sentence ran concurrently. Counts described offenses; the sentencing structure described how punishment was imposed. The people named in the earlier entries remained the same people. The arrangement of the terms could not be read as an arithmetic measure of the value of their lives.
Sacramento State's ballroom gave the final hearing a different setting from the one I had initially imagined. The official account said the relocation accommodated victims and family members and allowed distancing during the pandemic. The August schedule named Judge Michael Bowman and provided for public access through limited attendance and a livestream. The legal proceeding had adapted its physical setting to the people who needed to witness its end.
By that point, the essential changes in status had occurred in their proper order. An unidentified offender had become a candidate under examination. A reported comparison had preceded an arrest. Separate cases had been brought into a joint complaint. The defendant had pleaded guilty to the charged counts and admitted additional conduct. The sentence now closed the documented criminal arc followed here.
There was no need to manufacture a final surprise. The result was substantial because the earlier stages had been uncertain. In 2016, the appeal had still asked the public for information. When the genealogy work began, the public account had not yet reached the candidate. When charges were consolidated in 2018, the later guilty pleas had not yet occurred. An ending known to a later reader had once been unavailable to the people doing the work and the people waiting for it.
The last official date on my chart was August 21. I put the report of the sentence there, leaving the earlier entries in place. Removing them would make the result look self-contained. Keeping them showed how preservation, laboratory comparisons, renewed commitment, a new investigative avenue, and a combined prosecution had contributed to an outcome no single announcement could explain.
The chart also contained things the sentence could not alter. The tennis appointment would not be kept. The father would not walk his daughter down the aisle. The young nurse would not share the future her friend had expected with her. Those were not exceptions to the outcome. They were the reason an outcome mattered without being enough to repair the history.
I had followed the name behind the files to a reported legal resolution. I could now close that question without pretending to close every life it had touched. The remaining task was not another search for the offender. It was deciding whose names the reader would carry away once the headline no longer had to ask who he was.