Murders

Father Antonio Rodriguez keeps the image on his cellphone. A 12-year-old boy. Headless. His killers probably boys not a whole lot older than him. When Josue went missing, his frantic grandmother sought the priest's help. Rodriguez went looking for him and found the body. The crime chilled and disgusted him. Somehow, he needed to document the loss of another young life in a dizzying spin of daily, casual death.

After three hours' deliberations, a jury on Wednesday gave a life sentence rather than the death penalty to Jesse James Hollywood, the former marijuana dealer convicted last week in the slaying of a 15-year-old West Hills boy. Found guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder, Hollywood, 29, was portrayed by prosecutors as the ringleader of a convoluted plot to avenge a $1,200 drug debt owed by Nicholas Markowitz's older half brother.

The mourners carried her severed body inside the white brick mosque on a frosty morning before the sun rose, before the children arrived for school. Removing their shoes, wives and mothers shrouded in black passed through the women's prayer area, cordoned off from the men's with white drapes, and made their way to the washing room.

A Colorado man who says he bludgeoned his date to death out of rage and shock after discovering she was biologically male was convicted Wednesday of first-degree murder and a hate crime. Jurors deliberated about two hours before finding Allen Ray Andrade, 32, guilty of killing Angie Zapata, 18, of Greeley last July. District Judge Marcelo Kopcow swiftly sentenced him to life in prison without possibility of parole -- the state's mandatory sentence for first-degree murder.

After Sherri Rae Rasmussen was beaten and shot to death in 1986, her father urged Los Angeles police to investigate a fellow officer who had had confrontations with his daughter in the months leading up to her death, according to attorneys for the victim's family. But Nel Rasmussen's pleas, which he said he made during several interviews with police and in a letter to then-Chief Daryl F.

In a dramatic second day on the witness stand, Jesse James Hollywood denied ordering the execution of a 15-year-old West Hills boy to avenge a $1,200 drug debt owed by the boy's older half-brother. At least a dozen times, the 29-year-old former marijuana dealer told a Santa Barbara County Superior Court jury how much he regretted the events that led to the 2000 death of Nicholas Markowitz, who was shot nine times and buried in the Santa Barbara foothills.

On the evening of Feb. 24, 1986, LAPD homicide detectives found Sherri Rae Rasmussen's badly beaten body on the living room floor of her Van Nuys town house with wounds from three .38-caliber bullets to her chest. Weeks later, Stephanie Lazarus, a young Los Angeles police officer, called the Santa Monica Police Department to report that someone had broken into her car on 2nd Street, blocks from the pier. A gym bag had been stolen, she said.

When a stray bullet from a gang member's gun struck 3-week-old Luis Angel Garcia in the heart and killed him in 2007, police, politicians and ordinary Angelenos expressed outrage over the infant's death. But they weren't the only ones. Members of the Mexican Mafia, the notorious prison-based organization that authorities say controls Latino street gangs, demanded that those responsible be killed, according to an indictment unsealed this week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

Shortly after she sat down at her desk on the third floor of LAPD headquarters Friday morning, Det. Stephanie Lazarus was told a suspect in the basement jail had information on one of her cases. The 25-year police veteran went quickly downstairs. As Lazarus removed her firearm to pass through security, she unknowingly walked into a trap. There was no suspect -- only questions about a terrible secret police believe she has been harboring for more than two decades.

Edith Moreno was only 12 years old, but last week the Sun Valley girl had a serious question for her friend and next-door neighbor Karina Valdez. What happens when we die? Karina and her parents are Jehovah's Witnesses. Taking her Bible, 12-year-old Karina explained that death was like going to sleep and waiting to be resurrected by God. "I didn't really think anything about it because we were teaching her about our other beliefs," said Karina's mother, Irene Bell. "Edith was just a wonderful, happy child.