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It's been a long 22 years for Tina Curl, the mother of Becky O'Connell. Curl let her 9-year-old daughter take a walk to the candy store in 1990. Little did she know it was a walk her daughter would never return from.
Tuesday closed the final chapter in the case against Donald Moeller, the man who raped and killed O'Connell and Curl is glad it's all over.
"Beck finally got her justice," Curl said.
More than two decades after O'Connell was killed, Curl watched as the man responsible was put to death.
"I didn't sit, I stood as close to the glass as I could," Curl said.
On Tuesday, Curl visited the site where investigators found her daughter's body. She says O'Connell was like many children her age, full of energy and happy, but that her happiness was cut short.
"She didn't deserve what happened to her. She was right, full of life and that dirtbag took it out of her for his own sick satisfaction," Curl said.
Curl now says letting her daughter take that walk by herself to the candy store is one decision she wishes she would have never made.
"She'd be alive if I didn't let her go to that store by herself. Yeah, I hold that guilt with me," Curl said.
But now with the execution complete some 22 years after that day, Curl says she's the one who gets the final word.
"The only thing I wanted from him was to tell me what he did to Becky, how he got her. Well, I guess I get the last word after all, after Moeller," Curl said.
Curl says she has nothing against the state of South Dakota, but after this she has no plans of ever returning.