CROWN POINT | For 29 years, the date of death on 8-year-old Kenny Conrick's headstone has been blank.

His mother, Myrna Conrick Burkholder, said she was told by police not to put the date on her son's headstone because the killer could see it and come up with an alibi.

Burkholder finally can fill in that blank spot.

David Bowen is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday for the sexual torture and murder of Conrick, whose body was found Oct. 28, 1979, lashed to a tree in a wooded area in Calumet Township.

Burkholder remembers her son as a special boy with a thirst for knowledge and affectionate hugs and butterfly kisses.

She gently touched her left cheek where he used to kiss her. "Right here. I've got a lot of happy memories of him. Memory is what you cherish."

"He'd sit next to me, and the next thing I know I've got a Kenny around the neck," she said, smiling.

Bowen, now 44, pleaded guilty in September to the murder.

Bowen admitted forcing the boy to perform sex acts with him, then strangling the victim, plunging a large stick into the boy's chest multiple times and cutting him with a piece of glass.

DNA evidence that was unavailable 29 years ago linked Bowen to the child's death. He was arrested in December in Maine and extradited to Lake County.

Burkholder said there are no words to describe the anger that enveloped her when she first saw Bowen's face in Lake County.

"He looked at me, looked down," she said quietly. "He wouldn't look me in the eye."

Court records show Bowen, who was 16 at the time of the incident, became a suspect after police learned he had been accused more than a year before the homicide of sexually assaulting and beating a 9-year-old boy who lived near Bowen's home. The 9-year-old boy's mother agreed not to press charges against Bowen because Bowen underwent psychiatric treatment, police said.

Police said Bowen lived within blocks of Kenny Conrick at the time of the incident and admitted knowing the boy. But Bowen claimed he didn't see him on the day he was killed.

Police were forced to shelve the case as unsolvable a few months after the boy was found dead because of a lack of evidence. However, police caught a lead in late 1992 when an anonymous woman, later identified as Bowen's sister Donna Oprish, called Gary police and said she suspected her brother as the killer, police said.

Oprish gave police a DNA sample in 2006 that helped investigators establish that someone in her family had DNA consistent with DNA in seminal fluid and skin cells found on the boy's clothing -- part of the evidence meticulously collected and preserved.

Police said they obtained a DNA sample from Bowen in March that is so consistent with the crime scene DNA that fewer than 191 people in the United States could match the sample.

Burkholder said she never will have full closure until Bowen is dead.

Bowen faces up to 50 years in prison for Conrick's death when he is sentenced Tuesday, according to the plea agreement.