Trish Anderson spoke for nearly 25 minutes Monday in a Franklin County courtroom to eulogize her "smart, funny, witty, zany, unique" daughter and condemn the man who took her daughter’s life as "an evil monster."

She told the court about the 24-year-old woman who grew up in Warren in northeast Ohio, graduated with a degree from the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science and was training to become a funeral director at Shaw-Davis Funeral Homes in Columbus, where she had made countless friends in a short time.

"My daughter is Rachael Nicoletta Anderson," she said. "She is not case number 18CR00769. That always bothered me."

After she spoke, Anthony J. Pardon was sentenced to life without parole for raping and murdering Rachael Anderson during a break-in at her East Side apartment.

The sentence, imposed by Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Stephen L. McIntosh, was in keeping with the recommendation of a jury of eight women and four men who spared the 55-year-old Pardon from the death penalty after convicting him of the crimes in February.

McIntosh also gave Pardon an additional life sentence for the physical harm caused during the rape. And he tacked on 63 years for kidnapping, aggravated robbery and aggravated burglary, as well as finding that Pardon qualified as a repeat violent offender.

McIntosh admitted that even he was startled by the brutality of the crime when prosecutors first projected on a courtroom screen a crime-scene photo of the victim’s body, gagged and hogtied and stuffed in a bedroom closet.

Prosecutors used DNA evidence and cellphone-tracking technology to help establish that Pardon raped and strangled Anderson and stabbed her in the back of the neck in her apartment in the 3000 bock of Allegheny Avenue on the night of Jan. 28, 2018, her 24th birthday.

The jurors made Pardon eligible for the death penalty by finding him guilty of purposely killing Anderson while committing the other felony offenses. But in a separate sentencing phase, jurors were unable to unanimously agree that he should pay for the crimes with his life and instead recommended life in prison.

Pardon didn’t react as the victim’s mother spoke, nor when her father, Bill Anderson, called him "an animal who stalked and preyed on our beautiful daughter."

Before sentencing, McIntosh asked Pardon, "Do you have anything you want to say to me?"

"To you?" Pardon replied. "No."

Trish Anderson concluded her comments to the judge by contrasting her daughter’s life to that of her killer, whose criminal record traces back to two rapes and an attempted murder as a juvenile, which sent him to prison for 25 years.

"I’d like to know what his legacy is," she said. "What legacy he left for his family. Nothing but horror and ugliness and a path of destruction. I know that, unlike that, my daughter’s legacy, in 24 years, what she has accomplished ... her legacy will live on."

jfutty@dispatch.com

@johnfutty