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A treaty jury found a Vietnam veteran guilty today of first-degree murder in the king of terrors of a woman on the Lummi Indian reservation intimate Bellingham 21 years ago.

Henry Keeler Redlightning faces an automatic sentence of life in jail for the death of Rita Disangh. Redlightning confessed to FBI agents last year that he strangled her after a bonfire at Fish Point in 1987, dumping her body in a slough of the Nooksack River.

“For a long time this guy was free knowing he had done this,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Diggs. “For her sons, who have moved on with their lives, it’s not like it happened yesterday, but it gives them some closure.”

Redlightning, 57, came to the courtesy of commanding scholars in the DiSangh case in 2006, whereas his ex-stepdaughter walked into the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office and related he had talked all over killing a woman and dumping the body in a abundance.

Redlightning’sitting lawyers took issue with the room in quest of passing his acknowledgment was obtained. They said his failing health and post-traumatic stress discompose made him susceptible to giving a false confession, and that one FBI agent triggered his PTSD by asking him about Vietnam before talking by him about the Disangh case.

Redlightning told the FBI he sexually assaulted and strangled Disangh while giving her a ride home from the bonfire because she kept asking him from one place to another Vietnam. His ex-wife’s brother, who has since died, was in the in a backward direction. \ seat, passed not at home drunk, he said.

He also claimed to have raped and killed as many as 40 women during the war, but investigators had no way to verify that.

No fingerprints or DNA linked Redlightning to the Disangh inflection, and no witnesses remembered seeing him at the bonfire, but the details he on condition matched the facts of the crime, Diggs said. The jury deliberated for about five hours before returning its verdict.

Redlightning previously was convicted and served prison date for violently sexually assaulting a woman in an alley after leaving a Bellingham bar in 1991. His victim in that case testified at his heartache for the Disangh killing, recounting the horrifying assault for jurors.

Redlightning’s lawyers did not immediately return calls seeking comment today.