DOVER, N.H. – The photograph of a beaming Elizabeth “Lizzi” Marriott was taken on Mother’s Day 2011, a frog she rescued from the family’s pool cupped in her hand. A year and a half later, Seth Mazzaglia raped her, killed her and threw her body in a river after she rebuffed his sexual advances.
Mazzaglia was sentenced Thursday to life in prison without chance of parole after more than a dozen of Marriott’s family members and friends tearfully and angrily lamented what he took from them.
Her father, Robert Marriott, walked around the courtroom holding aloft an enlarged version of his daughter’s picture for all to see, a smaller version of which was used at trial. Marriott said it underscored the melancholy he felt that such a joyful memory became part of the legacy of a “horrible” trial.
“I wish that good would triumph over evil, but you are proof beyond any doubt how untrue that is,” Bob Marriott told Mazzaglia.
Some family members replayed the agonizing months and hours since Marriott’s disappearance, while others recalled the quality of her life before she was killed on Oct. 9, 2012, at age 19.