On Tuesday, he was convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife, Janine Sutphen, in 2003. Now he must spend the rest of his life in prison.

Sutphen's sons hugged one another in the front row behind the prosecution's table when they heard the verdict.

"It's over," said Darren Sutphen. "There it is," Christopher Sutphen said. "Done," said Robin Sutphen.

After more than two weeks of testimony, a Durham County jury needed a little more than two hours to decide that the state had proved its theory -- Petrick strangled his wife in January 2003 after a confrontation over either an affair or the money he had taken from her. For weeks, Petrick told people his wife couldn't come to the phone while he planned his next move.

Prosecutors said he eventually dumped her weighted body in Falls Lake and then reported that she had failed to return from a symphony practice. Fisherman found her body in Falls Lake five months later.

The sons already knew all that. There was plenty of evidence, and by most accounts Petrick did a horrible job defending himself. The three men had come to Durham for something else.

They wanted to know just what Petrick had done, and why. And they wanted to hear him express some remorse for killing their mother, an outgoing woman who played the cello in Durham's nonprofit symphony.

They never got what they wanted.

They watched Petrick cross-examine witnesses and fight the prosecutor over the evidence against him. And on the trial's last day, they heard him argue that he was the scapegoat for the Durham Police Department, which needed to save face in the death of a woman who had complained about safety near the symphony's downtown rehearsal hall.

"The police had promised something, and that wasn't followed through on," Petrick said. "Then I was arrested. It was a domestic crime, and they were off the hook."

And though at times he strongly argued that the state couldn't prove his guilt, Petrick never said he was innocent.

'Not good enough'

"I wish it would be simple enough for me to simply stand up here and say, 'I didn't do it, believe me,' " Petrick told the jury Tuesday. "But that's not good enough. Frankly, that's what anyone in my position would say."

Jurors declined to discuss the case afterward.

Throughout the trial, Sutphen's sons grimaced or glared as they listened to Petrick.

"He's not going to admit to anything," said Darren Sutphen, 39, a painting contractor. "It's very frustrating that all this goes on on his terms. ... There's no justice for us. There's justice for him."

There was a time when Sutphen's sons thought Petrick killed their mother in a moment of passion. They thought Sutphen had discovered that Petrick had cleaned out their bank account and then forged a check to try to hide the crime. They thought she confronted him and he snapped.

The Sutphens had agreed to a deal that allowed Petrick to plead guilty to murder and scores of fraud cases and serve a total sentence of a little more than a dozen years. But the offer came with a price. Petrick would have to tell them, in private, what he had done and why. Petrick decided to take his chances with a jury.

When the Sutphens came to Durham for the trial, they learned the crime might not have been committed in the heat of the moment. Data buried in Petrick's computers suggested that he began researching ways to kill months before Sutphen died. And those computers showed that he used his computer to solve the problems of keeping a body in his house for two weeks.

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