Posted on 12 September 2007 01:30:57 by Huntress
Police today identified human remains as those of Sam and Lindsey Porter, who disappeared three years ago after their father took them for a weekend visit.
Authorities made the announcement at an 11 a.m. news conference which provided details about bones discovered Sunday in a shallow grave in a heavily wooded area along Cement City Road in Sugar Creek.
Forensics tests using dental records had been under way to determine whether the remains were those of the Porter children. Sam and Lindsey were 7 and 8 when they disappeared in June 2004 after their father, Dan Porter, picked them up at their Independence home.
“At about 5 or so we got a call telling us that those bones did belong to Sam and Lindsey Porter,” said Indpendence police spokesman Tom Gentry.
Authorities also disclosed that on late Monday afternoon they took the children’s mother, Tina Porter, to the site where the remains were found. She reportedly is in seclusion.
Gentry declined comment on whether prosecutors would be preparing charges and said that he had not been briefed yet on the cause of death.
Porter, 44, was convicted in February 2006 of parental kidnapping with the intent to terrorize his ex-wife and sentenced to 38 years in prison.
After his arrest on the kidnapping charges, Porter told authorities several stories about what he had done with his children, including that he had cut them up and that he had strangled them. But he also told friends, relatives and The Kansas City Star that the children were alive and living with another family.
The property where the remains were found is owned by La Farge North America and had been of interest to authorities because the land is near the Porters’ home and was an area where Dan Porter used to poach deer. The area had been combed numerous times with search-and-rescue dogs since the children’s disappearance.
Authorities also had focused on the area because because just before noon on the day Dan Porter took the children, he called Tina Porter and asked her to meet him on Cement City Road to exchange vehicles with him. He told Tina Porter that he wanted their pickup because he had just bought some furniture at an estate sale in Liberty.
Tina Porter said she met Dan Porter and became concerned because Sam and Lindsey weren’t with him. When he told her he’d left them at the estate sale, she told her husband she’d drive with him to Liberty.
She said that as they drove along Cement City Road, Dan Porter kept looking around nervously as though he was searching for something, then told her to stop at a narrow path and drive the pickup into the woods. Tina Porter said he told her that he had stashed $50,000 there and wanted to go get it, but she refused.
Mike Hart, a long-time friend of Dan and Tina Porter who has kept in regular contact with Dan Porter since his arrest, said he still couldn’t believe the news.
“I know he seems like a monster, but I just wish you could have seen him in action earlier in life,” Hart said. “He was a whole other person who had a good outlook on life and a fairly good future until he got caught up in the drug thing and everything went terribly wrong from there.
“It was something he always seemed to be able to control until at some point he lost it and the drugs took over his mind and he simply melted down. And I’m sure the dramatic and horrific childhood he had didn’t help matters at all.”
Porter is currently in “administrative segregation” at Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, according to Missouri Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Hauswirth.
“He’s isolated from the general population,” Hauswirth said. “We put people in there for a variety of reasons…”
Hauswirth said corrections officials have been cooperating with the Independence Police Department.
“We have been sharing information and providing information to them. What’s in that information we cannot get into,” he said.
At the news conference not far from where the remains were found, Gentry said in “one sense it is somewhat of a closure, a resolution, to this long case…in another sense it hits us all right in the heart.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1894967/posts
Police today identified human remains as those of Sam and Lindsey Porter, who disappeared three years ago after their father took them for a weekend visit.
Authorities made the announcement at an 11 a.m. news conference which provided details about bones discovered Sunday in a shallow grave in a heavily wooded area along Cement City Road in Sugar Creek.
Forensics tests using dental records had been under way to determine whether the remains were those of the Porter children. Sam and Lindsey were 7 and 8 when they disappeared in June 2004 after their father, Dan Porter, picked them up at their Independence home.
“At about 5 or so we got a call telling us that those bones did belong to Sam and Lindsey Porter,” said Indpendence police spokesman Tom Gentry.
Authorities also disclosed that on late Monday afternoon they took the children’s mother, Tina Porter, to the site where the remains were found. She reportedly is in seclusion.
Gentry declined comment on whether prosecutors would be preparing charges and said that he had not been briefed yet on the cause of death.
Porter, 44, was convicted in February 2006 of parental kidnapping with the intent to terrorize his ex-wife and sentenced to 38 years in prison.
After his arrest on the kidnapping charges, Porter told authorities several stories about what he had done with his children, including that he had cut them up and that he had strangled them. But he also told friends, relatives and The Kansas City Star that the children were alive and living with another family.
The property where the remains were found is owned by La Farge North America and had been of interest to authorities because the land is near the Porters’ home and was an area where Dan Porter used to poach deer. The area had been combed numerous times with search-and-rescue dogs since the children’s disappearance.
Authorities also had focused on the area because because just before noon on the day Dan Porter took the children, he called Tina Porter and asked her to meet him on Cement City Road to exchange vehicles with him. He told Tina Porter that he wanted their pickup because he had just bought some furniture at an estate sale in Liberty.
Tina Porter said she met Dan Porter and became concerned because Sam and Lindsey weren’t with him. When he told her he’d left them at the estate sale, she told her husband she’d drive with him to Liberty.
She said that as they drove along Cement City Road, Dan Porter kept looking around nervously as though he was searching for something, then told her to stop at a narrow path and drive the pickup into the woods. Tina Porter said he told her that he had stashed $50,000 there and wanted to go get it, but she refused.
Mike Hart, a long-time friend of Dan and Tina Porter who has kept in regular contact with Dan Porter since his arrest, said he still couldn’t believe the news.
“I know he seems like a monster, but I just wish you could have seen him in action earlier in life,” Hart said. “He was a whole other person who had a good outlook on life and a fairly good future until he got caught up in the drug thing and everything went terribly wrong from there.
“It was something he always seemed to be able to control until at some point he lost it and the drugs took over his mind and he simply melted down. And I’m sure the dramatic and horrific childhood he had didn’t help matters at all.”
Porter is currently in “administrative segregation” at Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, according to Missouri Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Hauswirth.
“He’s isolated from the general population,” Hauswirth said. “We put people in there for a variety of reasons…”
Hauswirth said corrections officials have been cooperating with the Independence Police Department.
“We have been sharing information and providing information to them. What’s in that information we cannot get into,” he said.
At the news conference not far from where the remains were found, Gentry said in “one sense it is somewhat of a closure, a resolution, to this long case…in another sense it hits us all right in the heart.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1894967/posts
