Porter children's bodies identified [Kansas City]

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.”

To reach Judy L. Thomas, call 816-234-4334 or send e-mail to jthomas@kcstar.com. To reach Tony Rizzo, call 816-234-4435 or send e-mail to trizzo@kcstar.com.

Dan Porter’s recent letters indicate a concern for his safety in prison

By JUDY L. THOMAS
The Kansas City Star

Porter

In recent letters from prison, Dan Porter told a friend that he was about to be moved from segregation to the general population and said that no matter where they put him, he wouldn’t be safe.

“After me telling you that I was going to the hill and not PC (protective custody), I thought you would write more since after I get moved and go out into the yard all them stingers will be waiting for me,” Porter wrote to longtime friend Mike Hart, referring to a form of torture that he’d heard some prisoners occasionally inflicted on others.

The spelling and grammar from the excerpts quoted here are uncorrected.

“And I already heard there waiting for me in PC or on the hill. So I’m not safe no matter where I go. And most of all these guys here are never going home. So if they stab or kill someone what will they do to them? Nothing.”

On Tuesday, police confirmed that they had found the remains of Porter’s children, Sam and Lindsey, in a shallow grave in Sugar Creek.

Hart, a longtime friend and former co-worker of Porter’s, has written to Porter regularly since Porter’s arrest three years ago for the kidnapping of his children. Recent letters indicate that Porter was becoming more isolated from the outside world.

“What is going on?” he wrote in a Sept. 4 letter from the Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, Mo., where he is serving a 38-year sentence. “I mean where are your letters? Are you getting tired of writing or what?

“I’ve written Devin and Sarah (his half brother and sister-in-law) 5 times and waiting for them to write back. It’s like their starting to write less and less but then again everyone is writing less and less. Even you. Haven’t heard from mom for a long time.”

Then he made a request.

“Maybe you could help me out and get me some pen-pals from the internet or sign up yourself on some kind of dating service and fish for me some female companionship. They can be old and they can be so ugly that they have to trick or treat from the telephone. I don’t care if their old fat and ugly.”

Porter mentioned that he had recently acquired a “celly,” or cellmate, after being alone for 15 months.

“And we’ve been playing cards and the loser has to do 25 push-ups and we’ve been doing 200 to 600 every day and it sure makes a guy hungery.”

He also talked about dying.

“I’m getting word to Devin, because he is the one that they will contact when I’m gone and I don’t want him to have to pay the bill of the expense of burying me,” he said. “Just let this place cremate me and throw me in the ditch or what ever they do.”

In his last letter, dated Thursday, Porter complained that Hart hadn’t sent him a subscription to National Geographic.

“Well, you did it to me again there, Lucy, you pulled the ball away just as I went to kick it,” he wrote. “I told everyone that I was getting the National Geographic and one time you even said it was on the way.”

Then he spoke of a “project” he was working on.

“And I’m just about done. So you will know soon. Perhaps in another week or two.”

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