Man Accused of Killing Girl Dies

A man awaiting trial in the suspected 1969 slaying of a 3-year-old girl whose body is still missing has died of natural causes at an Anaheim hospital -- before prosecutors were able to tape a deathbed interview with him, authorities said Saturday.

James Michael Kent, 63, died Friday at Western Medical Center-Anaheim, said Orange County sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino. He had been hospitalized with kidney and liver problems and was on a respirator when he died.

Kent, of Lakemoor, Ill., and Donna Prentice, 58, of Genoa, Wis., were charged in September in the death of Prentice’s daughter, Michelle Pulsifer.

Kent denied killing the girl, but told police he had helped Prentice bury the child in Silverado Canyon. Michelle’s gravesite has not been found.

Kent and Prentice lived in Huntington Beach at the time of Michelle’s disappearance. Prosecutors said the couple moved to Illinois without the girl in 1969, telling their 6-year-old sons from separate marriages that there was not enough room in the car for the girl. The boys were told that Michelle had been left with a relative in California, prosecutors said.

The couple split up years ago. Kent was being held on $1-million bail. Prentice is being held at Orange County Jail on $1-million bail.

Kent confessed to helping bury the girl in a videotaped interview with sheriff’s deputies in Lake County, Ill. Orange County prosecutors had hoped to obtain a videotaped confession from Kent, but were unable to because of his medical condition.

Orange County district attorney’s spokeswoman Susan Kang Schroeder said prosecutors may still be able to use Kent’s confession because “he told other people about his role” in Michelle’s apparent death besides investigators in Illinois.

Michelle’s father, Richard Pulsifer, said he tried for years to persuade authorities to investigate his daughter’s disappearance. He and Prentice divorced in 1968, and he visited Michelle every other weekend. One day, around July 4, 1969, he said, he showed up to pick up the child and found the house on Tigerfish Circle empty.

Pulsifer said he never got a straight answer from his ex-wife about Michelle’s whereabouts.

“[Prentice] told our investigator that Michelle is with her grandmother in Canada. She’s sticking to the story that she’s still alive,” Schroeder said.

The investigation of the child’s disappearance began in earnest in 2001, when the widow of Richard Pulsifer’s brother hired a private detective to find out what had happened to the girl.

The investigator turned over his files to the Orange County district attorney’s office in 2003.