Sacramento, California: Two cousins were sentenced yesterday to life prison terms in the 1973 shotgun slayings of two young girls in Northern California, said Deputy Yuba County District Attorney John Vacek.
Larry Don Patterson and William Lloyd Harbour were sentenced to five years to life in prison in decades-old cold case, the maximum penalty under sentencing laws at the time of the crime.
For the same reason, the two men did not face possibility of death penalty in the deaths of 12-year-old Valerie Janice Lane and 13-year-old Doris Karen Derryberry.
“When she died, a part of me died with her,” Margarette Hasting, mother of Valerie Lane, said in a statement that was read to the judge.
Patterson pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder in December, while Harbour pleaded no contest to the same charges. The men were charged in September after a state forensics lab matched DNA from the two suspects to semen found on Derryberry.
The girls were reported missing on November 12, 1973, after their mothers said they never returned home from a shopping trip. Yuba County Sheriff’s Department learned hours later their bodies had been found along a dirt road in a wooded area near Marysville, north of Sacramento, where they had been shot at close range.
