A guilty verdict was reached Tuesday morning in San Jose court in the long-awaited murder trial of 26-year-old Antolin Garcia-Torres, long held as the sole suspect in the kidnapping and presumed murder of Bay Area teen Sierra LaMar in 2012. As ABC 7 reports from the courthouse, shortly after 9 a.m. the jury announced their verdict, finding Garcia-Torres guilty of first degree murder, murder while in the commission of a kidnapping (a special circumstance), guilty of attempted kidnapping in the commission of a carjacking, and guilty of the attempted kidnappings of three women in Morgan Hill in 2009.

The LaMar family expressed relief but ongoing grief outside the courthouse, with Sierra's mother saying in the press conference you can see below, "Nothing can take away the pain and the sorrow that we experience every day and will continue to experience for the rest of our lives. But truly we've been praying for the chapter to have this type of ending — justice."

Prosecutors took a risk in bringing to trial the presumed murder of LaMar, the 15-year-old Morgan Hill girl who disappeared on her way to school one morning in March 2012, because despite community and police efforts over the years, her body has never been found. The search was finally suspended in 2015, but by then investigators had a mountain of physical and circumstantial evidence against Garcia-Torres, who has maintained his innocence despite making strange and incriminating statements along the way.

As the Chronicle recounts, Garcia-Torres was living in a trailer park about seven miles from where LaMar went missing while waiting for a school bus. Soon after her disappearance, evidence surfaced suggesting she had not run away but was likely abducted, including the discovery of her cellphone in a field less than a mile from her home — and the early phase of the search was muddied with media reports of the fact that Sierra's father, Steve Wayne LaMar, was himself a registered sex offender.

Soon thereafter, though, Sierra's clothing and school books, including her underwear, were found near a shed, and mud on the clothing suggested she'd been dragged, according to investigators.

The most incriminating evidence against Garcia-Torres came when his DNA was found on the girl's pants, and her DNA was found in his car, along with her hair found on some rope in his trunk.

Garcia-Torres's only alibi for the six hours in which he was unaccounted for the morning of her disappearance was that he had gone fishing by himself, and infamously in this case he gave a statement saying that he had masturbated into a tissue in his car and tossed it out a window, apparently trying to explain how his DNA might have arrived on the girl's clothing — although investigators had never told him that what they found had been semen.

In closing arguments last week, Garcia-Torres's defense attorney Alfonso Lopez attempted a theatrical gesture, tossing balls into what he called his "shame bucket" as he counted up the pieces of missing evidence the prosecution could not produce, including Sierra's remains. "We don't see evidence she's deceased. She's missing, nothing else," he argued.

But in this case, the prosecution's gamble paid off, and even resulted in convictions on three counts of attempted kidnappings at a Safeway in Morgan Hill where Garcia-Torres formerly worked as a checkout clerk.

Garcia-Torres will now return to court for sentencing, with the jury reconvening on May 16 to begin that phase.

Previously: Defense Lawyer In Sierra LaMar Case Says She's Not Dead, Just Missing