Runaway Girl, 14, Held in Arizona Triple Killing

In May she graduated from the eighth grade. In July her father reported she had run away from their Lancaster home. Now, in the waning days of August, the wayward 14-year-old girl sits in an Illinois jail cell, accused of taking part in a triple murder.

In what may have been a case of an auto theft exploding out of control, the girl and two men--including a 48-year-old Palmdale married man she apparently hitchiked to Arizona with--have been arrested in connection with the slaying of three people there, authorities said.

Mohave County, Ariz., sheriff’s deputies said they have placed the girl at the scene of the killings in the town of Golden Valley but have yet to determine the extent of her involvement.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Gordon Carn, who runs the missing children detail in the Lancaster area, said the girl’s father reported on July 30 that the girl, who has a history of running away from home, had disappeared the previous day.

In his missing person report, the girl’s father described his daughter as incorrigible. “She’s a discipline problem,” he wrote. “She comes and goes whenever she feels like it.”

Earlier this year the girl graduated from Piute Middle School in Lancaster. And while the eighth-grader had a sporadic attendance record, school Principal Eugene Premer said the teen was slated to start high school this fall. “She had some attendance problems, but she was relatively quiet and low key,” Premer said.

Tuesday, she was being held for Arizona authorities in a Chicago-area jail on suspicion of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the deaths of Roland Wear, his companion Leta B. Kagen and her son, Robert Delahunt, 15.

Wear, 50, and Kagen, 37, were found Aug. 15 shot to death in their trailer in Golden Valley, 15 miles west of Kingman. Sheriff’s deputies also found Delahunt stabbed to death in an adjacent trailer.

Mohave County sheriff’s spokeswoman Jody Schanaman said the three had been dead at least two days before officers found their badly decomposed bodies.

Robert Poyson, 20, who lived with them, had disappeared and the victims’ Nissan pickup was also gone, Schanaman said.

Deputies immediately sent out a nationwide bulletin on the truck, which was found during a routine traffic stop three days later in Anna, Ill. At the wheel, authorities said, was Frank Anderson, whose wife had reported him missing from their Palmdale home Aug. 3.

Investigators suspect the girl and Anderson knew each other and hitchiked to Arizona together before splitting up, Schanaman said.

Two days later, Poyson and the girl were taken into custody while sleeping at a homeless shelter in Evanston, Ill. Officers located them by questioning Anderson and interviewing people who had seen the girl hitchhiking with Poyson, authorities said.

Anderson was expected to be extradited to Mohave County Tuesday. Poyson and the girl are scheduled to be extradited to Arizona in the next few days, Schanaman said. Both men are being held on three counts of suspicion of first-degree murder.

Carn said the teenager’s situation is unusual for a runaway in Los Angeles County. “We have hundreds of missing reports all the time,” he said. “This is just one of them. Usually most of the kids are repeat runaways and about 99% of them usually return home.”