Americans love sensational stories of violence and unusual cruelty. The latest, of course, being the drug-crazed cannibalism of a Miami man, or the Canadian porn star suspected of dismembering a victim.

Yet run the name Charles Taylor by your average crime-blog watcher and wait for the reaction.

Anything? Taylor is the former president of Liberia who engineered his election into office after prevailing in the civil war he had instigated. He also masterminded the massacres of Sierra Leone’s civil war, which killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes and left much of the county’s population mutilated — hands, feet and legs hacked off by rebels.

Yes, that guy.

The International Criminal Court just concluded Taylor’s five-year trial, finding him guilty on 11 counts of war crimes. Now he’s going to pay for them for the rest of his life with a 50-year sentence in a British prison.

Yet the proceedings before three judges drew the most attention when supermodel Naomi Campbell testified about Taylor’s gift of “blood diamonds” to her. Taylor armed his rebels with the proceeds of the country’s diamond industry.

The level of cruelty aided and abetted by Taylor is difficult to fathom, and is certainly uncomfortable to contemplate. Taylor once ran under the campaign slogan: “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him anyway.” But let’s not miss the importance of his conviction and sentence.

Taylor is the first former head of state to be convicted of war crimes since World War II. The ruling not only afforded a bit of justice for his victims and their families in Sierra Leone, but it also sent a message to other abusers of humanity.

The same day Taylor was sentenced, 13 bound corpses were found in eastern Syria. Those deaths followed the massacre of more than 100 people the week prior under the watch of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

So many of the world’s monsters have gone to their graves having escaped accountability — Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic, to name a few.

Yet others accused or suspected of human-rights abuses are very much alive; Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti and Efraín Ríos Montt of Guatemala readily come to mind, as does Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, who is wanted for genocide in Darfur. Perhaps someday he, too, will wind up at The Hague.

Taylor’s trial was excruciatingly long, which is part of why it tended to slip from focus. Deliberations alone took 13 months. More than 100 witnesses testified.

A rape victim told of being forced to carry a sack with the severed heads of relatives, including her two children. Decapitations were common. The heads would sometimes be placed on stakes, threats to induce compliance with slave labor in the diamond mines. Others told of witnessing soldiers ordering lineups of people who were to have their limbs cut off.

Children did much of the killing, often drug-induced so they would willingly murder their own families or nearby villagers.

Today, Liberia remains a country wrecked by the violence, psychologically and in its infrastructure. Its ability to rebuild, to regain a level of economic stability, is uncertain. Under those circumstances, remembering, putting the stories of such violence in their proper place, can be difficult.

So some of that duty falls to the rest of the world. The least we can do is to record what happened and punish those who were responsible.

For many Americans, his crimes are distant events of little relevance. The overwhelming barbarity of the violence makes them, if anything, more unreal. And, yet, in 1985, Taylor sat in a Massachusetts jail on embezzlement charges. He escaped. (In 2009, at his trial, he claimed the CIA aided his jailbreak.) And Americans may not realize that simply by buying their beloved diamond jewelry, they might have played some role in funding these atrocities.

Some have questioned the international trial’s massive cost. Prosecutors were not able to gain access to Taylor’s vast wealth, literally blood money. He didn’t even have to pay for his own failed defense.

Yet it was worth every penny. Evil just got its due.

If there is to be hope for a more peaceful world, the Charles Taylors have to pay for their crimes. One down, many more to go.