They endured the day Stephanie Scott would have married her childhood sweetheart, the day her burnt body was found and the day of her funeral in the NSW Riverina.
Now her loved ones face the prospect of hearing the details of her murder and rape when Vincent Stanford fronts his sentence hearing in October.
The 25-year-old school cleaner pleaded guilty on Wednesday in the NSW Supreme Court to murdering and raping the popular 26-year-old teacher on April 5 last year, less than a week before she was due to marry Aaron Leeson-Woolley.
The rape charge was said to have been aggravated by depriving Ms Scott of her liberty before the offence.
Wearing prison greens and appearing via video-link from Sydney's Long Bay jail, the loner replied "guilty" to each charge while Ms Scott's mother and sister watched from the public gallery.
Noting the distance from Ms Scott's community in the NSW Riverina and Sydney, Justice Robert Allan Hulme set down the one-day sentence hearing in Griffith on October 11.
The bubbly teacher had gone to Leeton High School on Easter Sunday to make sure drama and English lessons were in place for her substitute while she enjoyed her Tahiti honeymoon.
At midday, Ms Scott sent an email to a bus company confirming transport for guests to her country wedding the following weekend.
Although it was outside his rostered hours, Stanford also turned up at the school that day.
When Ms Scott didn't return home to Mr Leeson-Woolley, she was reported missing and at first her family feared a car accident on an isolated back road.
But Stanford, who moved to the Riverina from Holland about a year earlier, was arrested on April 8, after police found a camera with pictures of a burned body.
Two days later, and the day before she was due to walk down the aisle, police found Ms Scott's body in a burned patch of scrub in the Cocoparra National Park, 70km from the school, near Griffith.
On what should have been the happiest day of Ms Scott's life, the town of Leeton was awash with yellow as family and friends held a community picnic. A private funeral was held later at the picturesque venue where the nuptials were to take place.
In March, Stanford was ordered to stand trial after a magistrate considered evidence which included email purchases and invoices for Viagra, sex toys, plastic handcuffs, a training sword and cleaning supplies.
Membership details for dating and pornography websites, website downloads, copies of Facebook conversations and Google Maps queries were also tendered to the court.
Born in Tasmania, Stanford, who has an identical twin brother Marcus, moved to the Netherlands when he was young and spent most of his life there before returning to Australia.
His sibling Marcus Stanford, who has pleaded guilty to being an accessory to murder after the fact, is facing a sentence hearing in Leeton on August 23.
