The murder of schoolgirl Sarah Payne touched hearts, not only in Sussex but across the nation.

Few people will forget the picture, displayed thousands of times, of her face followed by chilling details of her death.

There was an agonising wait between her disappearance and the sad discovery of her body.

There was another long gap before Roy Whiting was charged and many more months before the case came to trial at Lewes Crown Court.

The trial, too, lasted for weeks and the jury took an agonisingly long time to come to its verdict but at last it found Whiting guilty and he will spend the rest of his life behind bars where he deserves to be.

Whiting is an evil man who calculated how he could capture the eight-year-old girl, take her away in a van, sexually assault, suffocate and bury her.

One moment she was playing innocently with other children on a sunny day. The next, she was kidnapped by a man who is every parent's nightmare come true.

The Argus alone received hundreds of messages from ordinary people upset at her death. This was multiplied many times across the UK.

No praise is high enough for the police and forensic experts who painstakingly put together the evidence that would convict Whiting.

The search for Sarah was the biggest and most complex inquiry ever carried out by Sussex Police. At the trial, the case against him was compelling.

Whiting's own blustering and unconvincing evidence only added to the prosecution argument.

Praise is also due to Sara and Michael Payne, the little girl's parents, who have been through agony. Despite their despair, they never shirked from facing the public and they attended the trial daily.

What the jury could not be told was that Whiting had done the same thing five years earlier, only on that occasion the child survived.

Had he escaped jail this time, there is little doubt he would have felt the compulsion to attack another child.Whiting appears to be a paedophile who does not consider that he has done wrong. After the last case, he refused to take part in a scheme for rehabilitating sex offenders.

There are questions about whether paedophiles who refuse such help should be released into society and whether Whiting should have served only two years of the four-year sentence he received for the previous offence.

But the case of Sarah Payne shows society cannot be too careful in protecting young children from the occasional paedophile who becomes a killer.

Sara and Michael Payne will have to live the rest of their lives with the sadness of their child's death.

But they have the satisfaction that her killer will never again walk free and that the law is likely to be changed to lessen the chances of future tragedies.