SAN BERNARDINO >> Gloria Densham waited 40 years to hear the words uttered in a San Bernardino courtroom Friday.
The 81-year-old woman’s daughter, Cynthia May Hernandez, went missing in 1976. The 18-year-old from Glendora left her home to go see a horror movie at a Covina theater, and disappeared.
Now, a 62-year-old felon from Walnut — who has been in prison since 2013 after pleading guilty to importing and selling counterfeit, collectible Disney pins — has admitted to killing Hernandez.
At the San Bernardino Justice Center on Friday, Larry James Allred took a plea deal and admitted to the first-degree murder of Hernandez.
Though Allred must wait to be sentenced Oct. 17 at the same courthouse, and while 1976 laws will make him eligible for parole in seven years, the judge at Friday’s hearing did not equivocate about what the man’s guilty plea would mean.
“This is a life sentence,” Judge Richard V. Peel told Allred.
Densham was in tears as she walked out of the courtroom. She took a moment to compose herself and said she would be all right.
“Finally. God is good,” Densham said. “Thank God. Thank God.”
“Finally (we’re) going to get justice for Cindy,” she said.
She said she believed Allred took the deal because he “is guilty.”
“He not only killed a young woman, but he also killed a child of God,” she said.
Allred will not only pay in this life, but in the next as well, Densham said.
Hernandez was a recent Charter Oak High School graduate at the time she went missing.
On Aug. 26, 1976, she headed to the Fox Twin Theaters in Covina to see a nightime showing of the “The Omen.” Her boyfriend was sick with the flu, and a friend she called had already seen the movie or didn’t want to go, so she went alone.
She never came home.
Relatives discovered the car she used, a 1963 white Chevrolet station wagon, still parked behind the theater at 211 N. Azusa Ave.
For decades, the teen’s disappearance was a mystery. It became the oldest missing person case in Glendora Police Department history.
About five years ago, the department reopened the case.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department later took over the investigation, and by April 2016, prosecutors with the county’s District Attorney’s Office had charged Allred with killing Hernandez. The missing woman’s remains had been found, but the department would not say say where, when or under what circumstances the discovery was made.
Authorities also have not revealed how Allred became their suspect.
“It would be inappropriate to comment on anything pertaining to the evidence at this time,” said Christopher Lee, spokesman for the District Attorney’s Office.
In 1975, Allred was convicted of kidnapping a woman at gunpoint in San Bernardino County and raping her. In 1978 while on parole, he was convicted of kidnapping two girls, ages 16 and 17, and raping them over a seven-day period, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.
In 2013, Allred was sentenced to eight years in prison for illegally importing Disney pins from China and attempting to sell them over the internet.
Deputy District Attorney Denise Yoakum asked the court to release Hernandez’s bones to the family so they could bury them.
Densham wants to bury her daughter in Glendora. And she plans to be there when Allred comes up for parole in seven years.