His attorney, Stephen H. Sacks, argued that his client had sex with the victim but didn't kill her. It's about all lawyers can say when DNA puts suspects at the scene. But the lawyer pointed to a mysterious phone call made from a pay phone a few days after the body was found in the back seat of a car. A man gave a homicide detective the names of two other suspects, one of whom had been on a single date with the victim. Police cleared those men in the case and Sacks said the judge wouldn't allow the phone call into evidence.

And Rivers didn't help his case by writing two letters from his jail cell while awaying trial. He wanted to show that he knew the victim, and he begged two friends to tell police they had seen him with Burton in his apartment several times before she died.

"The testimony I need from you is you visited me at that address on several occaisions and saw me with Risha," one letter contained in the court file says. In another, he wrote: "So to prove that I know or knew 'Risha' my lawyer asked me if I could find some witness that could testify to seeing me with this person at least once."

He offered to pay one friend $100 for his efforts.

"This could very well keep me from getting life," Rivers wrote.

Monroe had to take the witness stand and face her daughter's killer. She had to tell the jury that she had never met him before, and that her daughter had never mentioned him. Prosecutors pressed this was a stranger-on-stranger attack.

"I didn't want to see that gentleman," Monroe told me.

She called him a gentleman because that's the way she was brought up. She apologized for her use of words. She's naturally polite, but the jury has spoken, and the last of her childrens' killers has now met justice, and Ernest Roy Rivers can be stripped of his title of gentleman and formally be called a murderer.