A man who pleaded guilty in the 1988 rape and murder of a woman in the Old Colorado City neighborhood when he was 15 was sentenced Wednesday to 60 years in prison.

James A. Papol, 48, received the maximum penalty under a plea bargain in the slaying of 24-year-old Mary Lynn Vialpando, which remained among the region’s darkest unsolved crimes for three decades.

Papol’s arrest came in 2018, when a routine DNA database search by Colorado Springs police matched him to semen found on her body.

“What she went through is unspeakable,” said 4th Judicial District Judge Robin Chittum. “It was a prolonged period of

her being the focus of hate and rage and anger. And she struggled and she suffered and she fought back — holy cow.”

The sentence was imposed three months after Papol pleaded guilty in the case, averting a trial at which he was expected to argue not guilty by reason of insanity. At the time of his arrest, Papol was a longtime ward of the Colorado State Mental Health Institute at Pueblo after an insanity commitment from unrelated crimes. He and his attorneys say he is now stable thanks to treatment and antipsychotic medication. Authorities say there is no evidence Papol was disturbed when he killed Vialpando.

Vialpando was found beaten, stabbed and raped in an alley just off the Old Colorado City’s commercial strip on Colorado Avenue. Authorities say Papol was a teenager living with his mother and younger siblings in a nearby motel.

After his arrest, Papol told his mother in a recorded phone call that he found the woman dead and stole her jewelry, causing the body to tumble down a hill, investigators say.

During testimony on Wednesday, El Paso County Coroner Dr. Leon Kelly reduced some of Vialpando’s family members in court to tears as he detailed the multiple stab wounds and serious head trauma she suffered during her ordeal, consistent with attempts by her attacker to control her — while she continued trying to fight him off.

The case put Chittum in the novel position of sentencing a grown man for a crime committed by a child, forcing her to impose a penalty under the law as it stood in 1988, before the benefit of new research into violence by young people, she said.

Lead prosecutor Dan May, El Paso County’s former three-term district attorney, asked the judge to impose the maximum, calling it the first, and worst, crime scene of his career.

May, who was assigned to the case as a rookie, stayed on at the DA’S Office as a volunteer to see it through to a conclusion after leaving office in January.

Attorneys for Papol asked the judge to show leniency and consider a sentence on the lower end of the 40-60 years Papol faced under his deal, potentially leaving him open for parole in his late 70s or 80s.

They cited Papol’s history of childhood abuse and neglect under an alcoholic mother, as well as an addiction to drinking and drugs that took root while he was still in elementary school. One of his attorneys, Julian Rosielle, suggested the crime wouldn’t have happened if Papol had received the help he needed.

Roseille said Papol has shunned violence and worked on his mental health after going on antipsychotic medication at the state hospital, and he asked for a sentence that would leave Papol parole-eligible in his 80s, giving him something to work toward.

In brief remarks to the court, Papol also apologized to the family and the court, saying he had forgotten committing the murder in the chaos of the years that followed — an explanation the judge said she rejected as implausible.

Chittum, who also presides over a juvenile criminal docket, said that Papol deserved an uncommonly harsh sentence because nothing about his crime was ordinary. She would have imposed the maximum against him as a teenager, she said.

“This is unlike anything I’ve had before,” she said. “This is one of the most horrific, violent, vicious brutal, sadistic cases I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot.”

Most children, even those who suffer severe abuse, come nowhere near the kind of violence Papol inflicted, she said.

“You didn’t care the least bit that you did this, except cover it up,” she added.

The judge closed by addressing Vialpando’s family, who attended court hearings for more than two years. Among them were Vialpando’s daughter Coral Vialpando, who usually sat with a framed photograph of herself as a toddler with her mother.

Where so many families are torn apart by violence, the victim’s relatives stayed together, supported each other through “unspeakable” testimony, and saw her killer brought to justice, Chittum said.

“You’re an unbelievable bunch of folks.”