SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — A southwest Missouri prosecutor says he will seek the death penalty against a youth football coach charged with killing a 10-year-old Springfield girl who was kidnapped just two blocks from her home.
Greene County Prosecutor Dan Patterson on Friday announced that he will pursue the death penalty against 46-year-old Craig Michael Wood.
Wood is accused of raping and killing fourth-grader Hailey Owens in February after throwing her into his pickup truck while she walked home from her best friend’s house.
Patterson says that Hailey’s death was “outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman in that it involved torture, or depravity of mind,” one of the legal standard required to seek death in first-degree murder cases in Missouri.
