Terrance Mayo and Rachelle Peterson were young lovers - focused on each other and the baby they were expecting.

But the couple also formed two unwilling corners of a love triangle.

And that entanglement proved fatal.

Authorities characterized their deaths as part of a "fatal attraction," murders devised by Mayo's scorned former girlfriend.

On April 26, 1995, 16-year-old Cheryl Armstrong sent two teenage friends armed with guns into the Denver home of Mayo's parents to do her bidding, prosecutors said in court.

When Gregory Romero and Donnell Carter returned to Armstrong, who was sitting in the getaway car, they told her that Mayo, 17, and Peterson, 16 and pregnant, were dead.

"I love you guys so much," Armstrong told them, according to court testimony.

Attempts to locate the families of Mayo and Peterson were unsuccessful. But Mayo's mother, Juliet, has made her views clear to the court.

When Romero was found guilty of first-degree murder, she tearfully gave thanks to God.

"This is one down and three to go," she said, referring to the three co-defendants.

Carter, also a juvenile, was convicted of first-degree murder, and, like Romero, was sentenced to life without parole.

Armstrong was sentenced to 96 years, and Terrance Bawiec, 22, received 12 years for burglary and for being an accessory to a crime.

In 1996, when Bawiec was sentenced, Juliet Mayo wrote an emotional letter to the judge, urging a stiff sentence. She told the court about how her son placed second in the science fair and participated in a geography bee.

"There are so many life lessons that Terry and Rachelle had not or will not experience," Juliet Mayo wrote. "There are many things in life we will only be able to dream about. The thousand 'what ifs.'

"I often wonder what kind of home life these children (the killers) must have had. They certainly could not have had nurturing and loving parents. Because these parents did not even have the compassion or the common courtesy to offer condolences to me or my husband."