In the sweltering heat of a summer day, Sharon Patrick walked the cornfields of the DiNardo family’s Solebury Township farm, praying the rosary. She told herself that her Jimi would be found, perhaps traumatized, but alive.

Aimee Sturgis King stared up the long driveway toward the center of the property, where investigators searched for four missing young men: her son Mark Sturgis; Tom Meo; Jimi Patrick; and Dean Finocchiaro.

“It was just one giant blur," she said in a recent interview, recalling the events of that July day last year. "We were there before they started searching every morning. I was there after they all left. Staring. ... I would just stare into the distance, knowing my child was somewhere back there."

CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer Investigators use a backhoe in the search for the four missing young men on the DiNardo family farm in Solebury on July 12, 2017.

News helicopters hovered. Traffic backed up on Lower York Road as cars slowed, with drivers trying to get a closer look at the Bucks County tract that had become the epicenter of a national news story. At the foot of that driveway on the 90-acre property, four families gathered under tents, talking about their missing loved ones and wondering what might have happened.

Later that week, after days of searching, they learned that it had been the unfathomable.

Cosmo DiNardo, the property owners’ mentally ill son, confessed to a grisly crime, telling authorities he lured the young men to the farm under the guise of selling them marijuana, then shot and killed them. He ran over one with a backhoe, attempted to burn three of them in a converted oil tanker, then buried them on the farm.

DiNardo and his cousin Sean Kratz, both 21, were charged in the killings the next day, July 14.

DiNardo pleaded guilty in May and was sentenced to four consecutive life terms. Through his lawyer, DiNardo declined comment for this story, as did his family.

CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub holds a midnight press conference on July 13, 2017, to announce that the body of Dean Finocchiaro have been found on the DiNardo farm in Solebury.

Kratz’s trial is expected to begin next year. Through his attorneys, he declined comment, citing a gag order that bars defense attorneys and prosecutors from speaking publicly about the case.

Until now, the victims' families have stayed mostly out of the spotlight. But as the one-year anniversary of the murders approached, they sat down to recount the terrible events, to shed light on the lives of the young men who were killed, and to talk about how they have learned to live without them.

The news cycle has moved on in the year since the murders. National attention has focused elsewhere. But for these families, the pain — the ever-present heartache — is as real and as raw as it was the day the young men went missing.