Missouri had a missing person case make the news this week as reported by Avi Selk at The Washington Post.

Approximately 2,300 Americans are reported missing—every day. This includes both children and adults. 

According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), there are as many as 100,000 active missing persons cases in the United States at any given time.

A few days ago I posted about the murder rate of women involved in domestic violence cases. In 93 percent of those cases, victims were killed by current or former intimate partners: boyfriends, husbands, and lovers.

Today’s article reports on a case involving an autistic girl, Savannah Leckie, who was murdered in the first-degree.

Statistics report that 71% of children killed by one parent are killed by the mothers.

I’m including a few excerpts from the article. You may click here for the entire article, or click at the bottom of this page.

In an affidavit that reads like gothic fiction, investigators describe how a teen reunited with her birth mother last year on an isolated farm in Missouri — only to be tortured there, forced to crawl through hog pens and have salt rubbed in her wounds, and then finally murdered last month and burned in a fire pit.

This mother had recently started a business with her daughter and named it, Hidden Holler Farm Soap. The mother used chemicals from ‘the business’ as an accelerant to dispose of her daughter’s body.

This causes me to ponder how many hidden, unheard hollers, the sweet 16-year-old girl let out in her last days on earth. Sadly, no earthly soul who cared could see or hear the abuse she was enduring.

When law enforcement was notified that the girl was missing, the mother told them,

Her daughter’s favorite pillow, blanket and coloring kit were missing.

“I think she’s a runaway,” Ruud said, according to the affidavit. “Savannah is blaming herself for the fire.”

Rescuers fanned out across the woods and fields. A helicopter and plane searched from above, and missing posters went out as day passed with no sign.

Investigators began to get suspicious.

Ruud and her current boyfriend, Robert Peat Jr., were interviewed at the sheriff’s office,

But the couple were becoming less and less cooperative as the search went on, an investigator wrote.

Deputies returned to the farm on Aug. 4 — with dogs, state police and a search warrant. They now suspected that Savannah had never left the property.

In the ash, they sifted out a button, imprinted with little ducks, and finger bones and vertebrae and teeth.

Rudd and her boyfriend, drove for nearly 100 miles, to Summersville, Mo., and married each other there, on the same day police combed the farm.

Later…They (law enforcement) went back over the property, and the ash pile they’d searched before. According to documents published by the Ozark County Times, investigators left with a box of girl’s clothing; hair; a knife; a meat grinder; and more than two dozen bottles of lye.

“We’re dealing with someone who’s tried to dispose of evidence,” Ozark County Sheriff Darrin Reed told OzarksFirst.com.

She was charged Tuesday with first-degree and second-degree murder, fatal abuse of a child, tampering with evidence and abandoning a corpse — and “more charges are forthcoming on any individual that was involved in aiding or tampering in this investigation,” Reed wrote in a news release.

The sheriff told the Ozark County Times he wants the mother put to death.

 

A Missouri teen reunited with her birth mother – who then killed her and burned her body, police say…Click here to read article by Avi Selk at The Washington Post.