Howard Jansen III Kansas City father and girlfriend, Jacqulyn Amanda Kirkpatrick charged in the torture death of man’s 3 year old daughter, Olivia Ann Jansen.
A Kansas father and his girlfriend are facing felony murder charges in the death of his 3-year-old daughter — amid allegations that the girl was tortured according to reports.
Investigators believe the girl, Olivia Ann Jansen, was killed sometime Thursday, the day before she was reported missing by her father, Howard J. Jansen III, from her Kansas City home.
The missing girl’s body was found mere hours after her father reported her missing the Kansas City Star reports.
Also charged with murder was the man’s live in girlfriend, Jacqulyn ‘Jackie’ Amanda Kirkpatrick, 33, with the couple also facing charges of aggravated endangerment of a child and criminal desecration.
Authorities said the missing 3 year old’s body was found Friday, 5.30 p.m in a wooded area roughly nine blocks from her home. The nature and manner of the girl’s death was not revealed.
How do you explain the murder of a 3 year old child?
‘There’s no way to explain the death of a 3-year-old child,’ a police spokesman, Thomas Tomasic, said. ‘We wanted to find her alive and safe. It’s terrible. It breaks all of our hearts.’
According to Tomasic, police were given ‘several stories throughout the day’ and ‘none of them made sense,’ leading up to the morbid discovery of the young child’s body.
‘This is a loss for our community,’ Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree said during a Sunday press conference. ‘I implore everyone in this community to stand with this family as they go through one the most tumultuous times, a moment that nobody in life should ever have to go through.’
Jansen, 29, reported his daughter missing early Friday, telling police he last saw the girl at about 11 p.m. Thursday. Jansen told investigators he realized she was gone at 6:30 a.m. Friday, claiming he found his back door open, police said. Charging documents stated the 3 year old girl killed sometime on Thursday.
Justice for Olivia Jansen
Crowds of people, including the girl’s grandparents, gathered outside the Wyandotte County courthouse on Sunday, demanding justice.
‘I’m glad it’s first-degree murder, wish it was capital murder, but I wish it could be more,’ her grandmother, Elisabeth Jansen, told KMBC. ‘I want them to pay for what they did to her. This has been going on for months and it didn’t have to.’
Olivia’s grandfather, Howard Jansen II, said relatives tried to ‘seek help’ for the girl and contacted child welfare workers about the alleged ‘torture’ she was enduring, KMBC reported.
Jansen and Kirkpatrick remained in custody Monday at the Wyandotte County Detention Center on $500,000 bond, online records show.
Authorities have yet to offer a reason why the girl was ongoing mistreated, nor why child welfare agencies failing to step in as the degrees of torture continued to exacerbate in recent months.
