On January 6, 2003, trial began in the matter of People of the State of California vs. Sarah Dutra, in which the state alleged that Sarah Dutra had committed first-degree murder in the death of Larry McNabney. The charge carried two special circumstances: that the crime had been committed for money, and that it involved the use of poison. Additionally, Sarah was also charged with being an accessory after the fact of the murder, in that she had helped Laren Renee Sims Jordan Redelsperger McNabney conceal evidence of the crime.

Laren’s suicide had a paradoxical effect on the trial. In one way it hurt Sarah, because until Laren killed herself, there had been the chance that prosecutors would negotiate some sort of deal for Sarah’s testimony against the woman she had known as “Elisa.” But when Laren died, that left only Sarah to face the bar of justice.

Yet in another way, the suicide helped Sarah. The only evidence against her of intent to commit murder came from Laren’s lips alone, and once she was dead, the statements that Laren had made that night while being interviewed by Harker and Amunds were inadmissible as evidence.

The key witness against Sarah was Sarah herself—the hours and hours of interviews that she had given to detectives like Scheffel were used against her with devastating effect. And although Sarah had steadfastly maintained that she’d had no idea that the woman she knew as Elisa had given Larry a fatal dose of horse tranquilizer, it was impossible to believe her when she said that she hadn’t known for sure that Larry was dying. There had just been too many lies before that.

In the end, the jury agreed with Kevin Clymo, Sarah’s defense lawyer, that there was no reliable evidence that Sarah had intended to murder anyone. But the jury was troubled by Sarah’s indifference to Larry’s plight. All the way north in the dually, there had been ample opportunity for Sarah to alert someone that Larry was dying. There was yet another opportunity that same night, when she drove the dually to Vacaville to pick up Ralphie—why hadn’t Sarah told her mother and father what Elisa was up to, or at least what was happening with Larry? Sarah’s assertion that she hadn’t known that Larry was dying until he was dead didn’t hold any water—especially in light of all the lies Sarah had told the police before her arrest.

As for the accessory after the fact charge—there was no doubt about that. Not after Sarah, on tape, admitted having helped put Larry’s body into the refrigerator on the morning of September 12.

Sarah’s jury deliberated for three days. According to accounts of some, the panel, six men and six women, divided bitterly over Sarah’s guilt. The men, perhaps swayed by Sarah’s youth and beauty, thought she had been brutally used by Elisa, that she was innocent of any crime other than helping Elisa cover things up. The women on the jury were far harder on her—they thought she was guilty of first-degree murder.

When it became clear that first-degree murder would not prevail, the jury began considering second-degree murder—where the intent is to murder, but there is no premeditation. That possible verdict, too, resulted in a deadlock, although eleven jurors supported it against a lone hold-out.

In the end, the jury decided, based on one of the judge’s instructions, that Sarah was guilty of voluntary manslaughter—that while she had knowledge that doing nothing would cost Larry his life, she still did not act. As for the accessory after the fact charge, that was easy: guilty.

A month later, San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Bernard J. Garber sentenced Sarah to the maximum penalty allowed under the law: 11 years in state prison. Garber said the defining moment of the entire case came when Sarah admitted that she’d helped put Larry’s body into the refrigerator. That, Garber said, illustrated the callousness with which Sarah had acted toward a man who had never done her any harm.

So now we are at the end of this story of the Blanches—Larry and Elisa and Sarah—and if there’s a moral to the tale, it is this: no one really knows another person. We only think we do.

Larry thought he knew Elisa—even though that wasn’t really her name. Elisa thought she knew Larry—but Larry had deeply hidden flaws that made him something less than the “wonderful, charismatic person” she thought he was when she’d met him. And Sarah never really knew either Larry or Elisa. She never knew the Larry who had been the consummate lawyer, or even the champion horseman; all she knew of Larry was Elisa’s caricature, the drunken, apparently loaded sap that Elisa had portrayed him as, and all she knew of Elisa was what she yearned to believe Elisa was.

And who was Elisa, to Sarah? She was the sophisticated woman who knew how to use men; she was the woman who took her shopping for pricey items, who introduced her to rich horse owners, who confidently shuffled large sums of money by check and by wire, the woman who had taken a young, naive girl under her wing to show her how the world really worked. Sarah never saw the aberrational thinking, the inability to plan ahead that marked the course of her mentor’s hidden life—at least, not until it was too late.

If there is a key to understanding this complicated triad, it lies in the question that Sarah had told Herrera she’d asked herself that fateful night in the dually: “And I thought, ‘Why me? Why is she pulling me into this?’”

Why, indeed? Why, after having sent her away the previous evening, did Elisa suddenly need Sarah to come rushing back? Not because it was part of any plan—if there had been a plan, Sarah never would have left to begin with. The most obvious explanation is that Elisa wanted to tell Sarah what she had done—that she had, as they had talked about idly over the previous summer, actually, really and truly, had in fact given Larry an overdose; that she was killing him. Elisa wanted Sarah’s approbation for her action.

And in this, Elisa did not really know Sarah: while they had giggled together like schoolgirls the whole summer, busily separating Larry from his money, and had spoken casually of giving him an overdose, Elisa had come to see Sarah as a younger, sharper, more ruthless version of herself—someone utterly capable of taking such a step and pulling it off. If there had been no Sarah, Elisa never would have had the courage to do such a thing. In short, Elisa projected her own idealized image of herself onto Sarah—what she wished she was—while Sarah projected her own giggly, impish self-image onto Elisa, at least when it came to the subject of murder. When Elisa mentioned to Sarah that she wished she was rid of Larry, and the idea of overdosing him first came up, Elisa thought Sarah was serious; Sarah thought Elisa was simply sounding off. She never dreamed that such a thing might ever happen.

Then the event actually came to pass: Elisa gave Larry the overdose. When she called Sarah to rush back to southern California, it was to tell her: I did it, what we talked about. And this disclosure was less for the purpose of enlisting Sarah’s assistance as it was for moral support, for someone to tell her she had done the right thing.

There Sarah sat, that night in the dually, realizing for the first time that there was something mentally wrong with the woman she had admired; Oh my God, she actually did it. Realizing, too, that she was involved with Elisa up to her own neck in fraud and forgery, and even the seemingly vacuous discussion of murder, to Sarah, it was as if it were a TV crime show, but to others, it was utterly damning. In Sarah’s mind, there was no other choice at that point but to go forward with Elisa, because Elisa was incapable of bringing the thing off by herself without Sarah’s support, and if Elisa were caught, Sarah was certain to go down with her. There they sat, trying to figure out what to do.

If the facts unearthed by the investigators demonstrate anything, they demonstrate that the entire fatal episode was unplanned—that in fact, it occurred on the spur of the moment. But that was Laren/Elisa’s way from beginning to end. Only rarely in her life did Laren ever engage in anything like long-term planning. Instead, all of her life, decisions were made up as the need came along, by the seat of her pants; it was Laren’s curse that most of these decisions were short-sighted, intended to solve an immediate problem, but inherently self-destructive—whether shoplifting a hair-coloring kit, writing a bad check, or killing her husband, everything was done to meet an immediate crisis, and badly. And the crisis in this case: the fact that the money had run out, that Larry was certain to find out, that the Whalens wanted their money. The solution: sell the truck, sell the horse, and make Larry disappear.

Had the killing of Larry McNabney been the result of a plan, hatched secretly by Elisa and Sarah in the months prior to his death, the horse show at the City of Industry had to be one of the worst places to put such a plan into effect. If there had really been a long-term plan, how much better it would have been to poison him at home, then make him disappear, into a previously prepared grave, for example. In any event, there were literally hundreds of witnesses around to Larry’s disappearance—not the sort of thing one wants when planning a murder. Consider, too, that neither Elisa nor Sarah had made any concerted effort to consider what to do with Larry’s body until the moment they realized he was dead—and even then, they picked … a spare refrigerator? It was as if they were so surprised at the result of their actions that they couldn’t think of anything else to do—so they decided to put Larry away as if he were a plate of unwanted leftovers, another one of Laren’s short-term, disastrous solutions to an immediate problem.

In the end, one can only feel sadness for all three of the Blanches—Larry, whose life had begun with such promise, but ended in such misery; Laren, so bright, so beautiful, so personable, so tortured by something she herself never understood; and Sarah, so young, so talented, so unformed. Two lives wasted, a third blighted. For all his brilliance, Larry never fully realized that life wasn’t a race, it was a journey—that it didn’t matter much how fast one got there, but what one did along the way. Or Laren: “I am not good … I don’t have that in me. I don’t know why and I don’t know if I ever did,” she’d told Hogan. Even after all that she had done, even in death, there was something about Laren that made one want to love her. And Sarah: who grew up too fast, much too fast, so that one could only feel the most painful sorrow for the choices that she had made, and wish for something different.