The investigation into the slaying of Maryland state trooper Edward M. Toatley came to a somber conclusion in U.S. District Court today, as a 24-year-old convicted drug dealer pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Kofi Apea Orleans-Lindsay of Silver Spring, who set off a nationwide manhunt when he escaped after shooting Toatley during an undercover drug sting in Northeast Washington on Oct. 30, 2000, signed the agreement in exchange for prosecutors dropping their pursuit of the death penalty.

"I was angry about that at first," said Inez Toatley, the slain trooper's widow. She said she agreed to the penalty, she said, after realizing that Orleans-Lindsay would die behind bars.

The three-hour hearing today before judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was extraordinary in its length and its emotional drama. Orleans-Lindsay confessed to the killing. Inez Toatley spoke to the court about how she had rushed to the hospital so that she could listen to her dying husband's last breath. And William O'Malley, the assistant U.S. attorney on the case, paused on several occasions to blink back tears.

The most composed person in the courtroom might have been Orleans-Lindsay.

His voice flat, his face devoid of expression, the Ghanaian native told Kollar-Kotelly that he took $3,500 in cash from the 37-year-old Toatley that night for what was supposed to be a crack cocaine deal. He got out of Toatley's unmarked Toyota 4-Runner about 8:30 p.m. in the 2000 block of Douglas Street NE and pretended to go around the corner to pick up a stash of drugs.

Instead, he returned to the car a few minutes later. He had a .380 semi-automatic pistol in the pocket of his sweatshirt. He stubbed out a cigarette, pulled out the gun and pointed it at Toatley, who was still sitting in the driver's seat, wearing his seatbelt.

Toatley reached out and struck the gunman's wrist, but Orleans-Lindsay held on to the gun. He shot Toatley in the right side of the head.

"I was just carrying out what I decided to do," he said when the judge asked if Toatley had provoked him in some way. "I didn't give it any second thoughts."

Fellow undercover officers who were monitoring the transaction were slow to respond, and Orleans-Lindsay escaped to New York where he was caught two weeks later.

Prosecutor Glenn L. Kirschner outlined a daunting body of evidence. Toatley's car was equipped with hidden cameras, which videotaped the slaying. Detectives also recovered the gun, the bullet slug and casing, the cigarette butt and Orleans-Lindsay's key chain from near the scene. Much of it bore Orleans-Lindsay's DNA, to the extent that the odds of it being someone else's DNA was 570 quadrillion to one, Kirschner said.

"That's 570 followed by 15 zeros," Kirschner said.

After Orleans-Lindsay entered his guilty plea, a family friend of the Toatleys, Gloria Wilson, read letters from Toatley's parents, sister and oldest son to a hushed courtroom. The letters were a moving portrayal of a family devastated by their grief, overwhelmed by their loss and aching at the memory of the role "Eddie" had played in their lives.

Wilson wept as she read them aloud.

"No matter what I do or think about, thoughts of my son still creep to the front," wrote Edgar Toatley, the slain trooper's father. "It seems as if I am obsessed with his death. . . . I was once the patriarch of my family. I now cling to my daughter for guidance."

"I feel as if someone reached inside my chest and ripped out my heart," Wilson read, turning to the letter of Lilia Toatley, the victim's mother.

Inez Toatley told the judge that when an officer came to her door to say her husband had been mortally wounded, "my heart broke and my soul was gone."

She was rushed to Washington Hospital Center. She was ushered down a hallway lined with troopers and into a room where her husband lay on a bed, attached to a respirator.

"I put my head on his chest so I could hear his heart beat," she said. "I talked to him. I told him not to worry about the kids. I waited with my head on his chest, and then I heard the doctor say he was going to take off the respirator, and I lay there until I listened to his last heartbeat."

Orleans-Lindsay sat a few feet away, sitting back in his chair. His expression did not change.

Kollar-Kotelly then brought the three-hour hearing to a close.

"With this sentence, there is finality and there is closure," she said. "It is my hope that all of those affected by this judgment find peace."