Anthony R. Roberts, now 27, sat quietly and listened as Cynthia Bennett and her daughter, Samantha Bennett, described the devastation that the attack of March 22, 2009, brought on their family. The two hugged and wept in the middle of the courtroom as they traded places on the witness stand for the last time.

“Yesterday was Father’s Day,” Samantha Bennett said, “and today I’m sitting across from the man who took everything from us. I just needed to sit here across from him and say these words.”

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Roberts, then 20, of Middleburg, Va., leapt out of a van with Darwin G. Bowman, then 18, when they spotted the Bennetts walking along Riverside Parkway at 5:30 a.m. in the Lansdowne area of Loudoun. “F— it, let’s rob them,” Roberts told Bowman and the driver, Jaime Ayala, then 17, according to documents filed Monday in Loudoun circuit court.

Ayala waited in the van while Roberts and Bowman set upon the Bennetts with ferocity, beating them both repeatedly, with Roberts stomping William Bennett, 57, in the head after beating him unconscious, Roberts admitted Monday. The two climbed back in Ayala’s van, then returned to the scene 10 minutes later to scoop up any evidence, before taking that evidence and their own clothes to a parking lot in Sterling and burning them, prosecutors said.

Meanwhile, police called to the scene discovered William Bennett’s body, but Roberts and Bowman had moved Cynthia Bennett, then 55, behind a fence and she lay unconscious for 45 minutes before she was spotted. Howard David Reines, a trauma surgeon at Inova Fairfax Hospital, testified in 2011 that Cynthia Bennett suffered cuts and broken bones in her face and around her eyes, one ear was partially torn off, she had a severe injury to her pelvic area and she lost more than five quarts of blood through the wound in her lower body before doctors could halt the bleeding. “In 30 years, I don’t think I’ve ever quite seen anything like it,” he said.

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The Bennetts were both retired from the Army — William Bennett had attained the rank of lieutenant colonel and worked as a CIA contractor, and Cynthia Bennett had worked as director of procurement for the Architect of the Capitol. The couple had a house in Loudoun that Cynthia Bennett sold after the attack — a “bittersweet” decision, she said in 2011.

“I was missing what I had with my husband there,” Bennett said. And she wanted to leave the area “so I didn’t have to remember.”

Police initially had no leads, and the crime was terrifying to residents of the typically bucolic Loudoun suburbs. But within a month, Loudoun sheriff’s deputies had arrested all three men, and Loudoun Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Plowman said he might pursue the death penalty against Roberts.

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Ayala, originally from Annandale, pleaded guilty first in February 2011 and was sentenced to life plus 40 years. His statements to police gave the first indication of how the brutal crime had unfolded. Bowman pleaded guilty in 2013 and received a 43-year term.

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Roberts had been convicted of an unrelated burglary charge and was still serving time on that when he was indicted in 2015 for capital murder. His trial was set for September 2017 when he and his attorneys with the Virginia Capital Public Defender Office decided to enter a plea agreement that called for a life sentence on the murder.

“I just want to say one thing,” Cynthia Bennett said Monday. “This incident in March 2009 destroyed my husband’s life, my life and my daughters’ life forever. It’s changed everything.”

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Roberts stood to speak for the first time publicly, and he turned to face his family first, and then the Bennetts.

“I want to tell my friends and family and loved ones, I love you,” Roberts said first. Then he looked at the Bennetts. “I apologize for taking away y’all family, and y’all happy home. But I’m somebody’s child too. I made mistakes.”

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His voice rising, he said, “I’m man enough to sit in prison and man up for these crimes, but I can’t bring back their husband and father. … I apologize sincerely. I took your father from you. My father got stripped from me when I was a child. I had to learn how to be a man on my own. I apologize. I just took to the street.” And he sat down.

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“These may very well be one of the more atrocious and vile crimes this court may ever come across,” Plowman said. He later said he did not feel Roberts showed remorse in his statement.

Loudoun Circuit Court Judge Thomas Horne, who also handled Bowman’s case, looked at Roberts and said, “Before I throw the book at you, I want to speak to the [Bennett] family.” The judge said, “Mr. Roberts is going to add his mug shot to the array of monsters, or people who commit monstrous acts, that we read about every day in the newspaper. But I think all too often it’s the victims that are left out, because the court has to express the community’s sorrow for what occurred. Anger is a very real reaction for what occurred. … Mr. Roberts, I can’t say enough about how horrible this event is. You literally beat a man to death. Your anger was so pervasive on that morning, this wasn’t just misjudgment. This was uncontrolled anger to put other people’s lives in jeopardy.”

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Roberts pleaded guilty to, and Horne imposed life sentences for, capital murder in the commission of a robbery, aggravated malicious wounding, robbery and abduction with intent to defile.

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The Bennetts did not want to speak after the hearing. Roberts’s family and friends also declined to comment.

Plowman said he elected not to pursue the death penalty after “discussing this at length with the Bennett family. They needed the closure. They’d endured enough. They wanted it over. And I’m fine with that.” He said with the trial not for another year, and appeals after that, the process would last another 10 years, and it has already been seven since the attack. “I think that was a little too much to endure,” Plowman said.

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