German court sentences 81-year-old to life for 1994 US tourist's murder

More than thirty years after a young American woman was murdered on a summer journey through Germany, a court in Koblenz has closed a chapter that time alone could not close. Amy Lopez, twenty-four years old in 1994, was killed by a stranger who preyed upon her trust; the man who took her life lived freely for decades, growing old while her family carried an open wound. It was not the passage of time but the quiet persistence of science — a strand of DNA recovered from her clothing — that finally brought an eighty-one-year-old man before a judge and, at last, into a life sentence. The verdict