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Jeffrey Barton nearly got away with it.
The 1995 killing of 20-year-old Rachel Dietrich had gone unsolved for 10 years. Then, in 2005, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department's cold case homicide squad got a break.
The crime lab, using technology not available in the mid-1990s, captured a DNA profile from under Dietrich's fingernails. Testing showed it was consistent with Burton's DNA.
On Thursday, Barton, 44, was sentenced to at least 11 years and nine months in prison after pleading guilty to murdering Dietrich. He entered what's called an Alford plea, which allowed him to plead guilty but not admit guilt.
Deborah Dietrich, Rachel's mother, wrote letters - one to the judge, the other to Barton - about the pain of losing her daughter.
"When he murdered Rachel, he took a huge part of our lives from all of us," she wrote. "There are things and moments we will never again be able to share with Rachel. To share in her joys and sorrows."
"I often awake to thinking I've heard the phone ring and wondering if it's Rachel calling for help. The hardest thing was not being able to see her and hold her in my arms and say goodbye and I love you one more time."
In the letter to Barton, Deborah Dietrich wrote: "For as long as I live, I will never understand why you had to murder my beautiful daughter Rachel. She was such a beautiful, outgoing, kind, generous girl. ... I pray God will never let you forget her beaten body and her crying out. I can only thank God they found her."
Detective Steve Furr was the lead investigator in Rachel Dietrich's killing 14 years ago. He never forgot about her. He kept her file on his desk.
"It was one of those cases that I always thought about," Furr told the Observer Thursday. "I can now put it to rest.
"Rachel was an innocent victim. She was just working and trying to decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She never got that chance."
Mecklenburg Assistant District Attorney Marsha Goodenow called Rachel Dietrich's killing "heinous, atrocious and cruel." She told Superior Court Judge Gentry Caudill that Dietrich had suffered massive blunt trauma to her head, including skull and facial fractures. There also was evidence, the prosecutor said, that she had been strangled.
Goodenow said Barton had been Dietrich's boss at a cleaning company and had tried to start up a relationship with her. But Dietrich wasn't interested.
Dietrich left her family in Pennsylvania in September 1995 and moved to Charlotte with her boyfriend. She went to work at a cleaning company but quit a few days later. She then got a job with Spartan Security working overnight and mostly alone as a guard at the Duke Power operations center.
She arrived at her shift at 11 p.m. Oct. 13, records show. At 2:30 a.m., a Duke employee found the guard gate open but Dietrich was nowhere around. Her car was in the parking lot. Her purse was untouched in the guard station.
The next afternoon someone going to choir practice about a mile away at Torrence Grove AME Zion Church found her body in the grass behind the sanctuary. Dietrich had been killed less than a month after she moved to Charlotte.
In an interview Thursday from her home in Pennsylvania, Deborah Dietrich said her daughter's killer wasn't punished enough.
"I don't think he got enough time," she said. "That's not true justice."
Still, Deborah Dietrich praised police and prosecutors for their work in arresting her daughter's killer and putting him in prison.
"Detective Steve Furr wouldn't let this go," she said. "He wouldn't forget Rachel. Something kept eating at him to not give up."
