A couple accused of videotaping the rape of a woman and killing her were accompanied by a five-year-old Kansas girl when they surrendered in southwest Missouri Thursday, law enforcement officials said.
FBI spokesman Jeff Lanza said agents believe the girl had been taken from her home in Pittsburg, Kansas, which is about 17 miles west of Lamar, where Richard Davis and Dena Riley surrendered.
Lanza said the FBI is treating the girl's presence as a kidnapping and that authorities are trying to sort out any relationship between the couple and the girl, whose name was not immediately released.
Richard Davis, 41, and Dena Riley, 39, had been charged Monday. Each is accused of first-degree murder, first-degree assault, kidnapping, forcible rape and two counts of forcible sodomy in the death of Marsha Spicer. Her naked body was found May 15 in a shallow grave near Bates City, east of Kansas City.
'Sexual desires'
Police say the video found on a TV stand in the couple's Independence apartment shows the 41-year-old Spicer with duct tape over her eyes and her hands secured behind her back. She is beaten, raped and sodomized as she pleads for the attack to stop.
The room portrayed on tape matches the bedroom at the home of Davis and Riley, police said, and detectives noted that the couple had a camcorder aimed at their bed when officers interviewed them. Officers also say a notebook at the home made references to “sexual desires,” “choking,” “chasing” and “victims.”
Police interviewed the couple last week, but they fled soon after, before authorities obtained a search warrant and found the incriminating tape.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol followed them to Perryville, south of St. Louis, where they interviewed a woman about the couple’s disappearance Sunday. Police later learned the couple had been hiding in the back room of the woman's apartment and escaped after officers left. The woman, Susan Summers, has been charged with two counts of hindering prosecution.
Several family members and friends of the suspects have told detectives the couple had hopes of carrying out similar acts on others, but police say they’re unsure how valid those claims are.
Davis is on parole after spending nearly 18 years in prison for a 1987 rape and sodomy conviction. Riley has previously been charged with misdemeanors, but no felonies.
Earlier in the day, police searched fields, woods and the banks of a creek in the area north of Bates City where Spicer’s body was found. Police said only that they were looking for evidence.