It was not just Compton and Seslar who lay fatally shot (Seslar died after Sleeper fled) in the two-bedroom bungalow that warm August 7.

But that was not known until police roped off the scene and had already gone through much of the house. Compton's 6-year-old twins Sylvia and Sandra lay face-down in bed in one of the bedrooms, wearing matching orange-and-yellow striped swimsuits and covered with a blood-splattered bedspread.

"The Margo Compton case is internationally famous," Terry Katz, detective of the Maryland State Police, said when the trials began.

"If you're involved in outlaw bikers in any way, you know the Margo Compton case because of its magnitude and barbarism.

She knew something was wrong even before she reached the front step. Finding the door locked, but hearing rock and roll pounding from a radio somewhere inside the house, she went around back. What Sleeper saw in the fading light shocked her senseless for a moment. Lying in a slowly growing lake of blood from two bullet holes in his head, Seslar turned his face toward her and gasped.

But the jury was convinced: Garrett ordered Compton and the twins wiped out because she had left the job he arranged for her as a sex worker at The Love Nest, a sleazy nude encounter studio in San Francisco, and had testified against him in a Bay Area pimping trial.

Seslar, the son of Compton's live-in boyfriend Don Seslar, had the bad luck to be visiting that week -- and he just got in the way.

Their eyes were closed and their two favorite teddy bears were at their sides; one girl's fist still clutched a glow-in-the-dark Cracker Jack sticker.

Each had one precisely placed .22-caliber bullet hole behind her left ear.