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family in 1990 from New York to Sioux Falls, a well-kept, medium-size city along the Big Sioux River that serves as a market center for the sprawling expanse of farmland where South Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota come together. Homicides happen, but not many -- about a half dozen a year, most involving people who know each other, and where there is no mystery to solve.
• On May 8, 1990, Becky, a fourth-grader who lived with her mother and stepfather in a Sioux Falls mobile home, began walking a couple of blocks to Omer's Market to buy sugar to make lemonade. She never returned.
• Authorities say Moeller, a felon with a history of assaults who lived nearby, lured the brown-haired girl into his truck and drove her to a wooded area near the Iowa state line, where he raped her, stabbed her and left her to bleed to death.
• Moeller was interviewed shortly after the killing but disappeared before investigators could follow up. Detectives later tracked him down in Tacoma, Wash., and brought him back for trial. He was convicted in September 1992 based on DNA and circumstantial evidence. The trial, with detailed and graphic displays on how the child was killed, devastated the community, but the ordeal wasn't over: The verdict was overturned by the South Dakota Supreme Court because of the mention of past crimes during testimony.
• With a new trial ordered in 1996, the horror of the gruesome killing was relived, and lingered for years longer.
• Residents around Sioux Falls -- and also in Yankton and Rapid City, where the two trials were held because of pretrial publicity -- worried in new ways about the safety of their cities.
• "We very seldom left our kids at a baby sitter," recalled Marcel Kathol, a father of four and a juror at Moeller's first trial. "A lot of us, we held onto our kids a little tighter and made sure where they were at."
• Masten said that even though prosecutors won a second guilty verdict, the case stayed with him over the years through the periodic reports about Moeller's appeals.
• The stress of his work led him to shift into private practice and eventually to a career change to nuclear medicine.
• "Whether you're prosecuting or defending, the emotional investment that you've got in that is tremendous," he said. "You just sleep eat and drink that case for months, if not years. You have to be able to walk away from it, but it's really tough to develop that skill."
• Moeller fought his conviction and sentence until July, when he said he was ready to accept death as punishment for his actions. He removed the final obstacle by persuading a federal judge to dismiss his long-standing challenge of South Dakota's le

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