Body of Florida Girl Is Found After Sex Offender Confesses

After three weeks of searching for a 9-year-old Florida girl, police found her body Saturday within 150 feet of her bedroom, behind a mobile home that was sometimes occupied by a sex offender.

John Evander Couey, 46, had confessed Friday to the murder of Jessica Lunsford, and had told authorities where they could find her body.

Citrus County authorities spent the night searching the area around Couey’s sister’s home, and discovered Jessica’s body in a shallow grave in the early morning. Her father, Mark Lunsford, visited the site shortly after sunrise.

“Everyone heard me say, time after time, that she would be home,” Lunsford told reporters afterward. “She’s home now. And it’s over.”

Sometime during the night of Feb. 23, Jessica disappeared from her bedroom, leaving no sign of a struggle. More than 3,000 tips came in over the next weeks, but investigators found themselves at a dead end, said Gail Tierney, a public information officer for Citrus County Sheriff Jeffrey Dawsey.

They came upon Couey’s name through a combination of tips and a review of more than 200 sex offenders registered in the area. Couey had moved from the residence they had on file without informing authorities, and when officers visited his sister’s mobile home, his niece told them she had bought Couey a bus ticket to Savannah, Ga.

On Wednesday, officers in Savannah interviewed him. On Friday morning, police caught up with Couey again in Augusta and administered a polygraph test. At the end of the polygraph, “He basically turned to the polygrapher and said, ‘I don’t need you to tell me the results. I’d like you to bring back the two detectives and the special agent. I’m sorry I wasted your time,’ ” Tierney said.

In the small town of Homosassa Springs near Tampa, where hundreds of neighbors had helped search for the girl, neighbors streamed to the Lunsford home with casseroles, flowers and stuffed animals. Anger was coursing through the community, and many residents called for the death penalty.

Dawsey, the sheriff, called Couey “not a quality person, by any means ... truly a piece of trash.”

William Coats, the Lunsfords’ pastor at Faith Baptist Church, said he had heard that other prisoners at the jail were anticipating Couey’s arrival, “wanting to get their hands on his neck.”

“I’d like to see him dead,” said Kalyn Boles, 30, a Lunsford cousin who lives in North Carolina. “It’s right there in the Bible -- an eye for an eye. I think whatever happened to her should happen to him.”

The family, she said, is experiencing “great loss, great sadness, a horrible sadness, a hole.”

Couey has a long criminal record, which includes multiple burglaries, indecent exposure and carrying a concealed weapon.

He was accused of grabbing a girl in her bedroom during a 1978 burglary and kissing her, but was never charged with a sexual offense, Tierney said. He was also convicted of fondling a child in 1991.

Citrus County authorities have charged Couey’s sister, Dorothy Dixon, and two other residents of the mobile home with obstruction for failing to inform the police of Couey’s incriminating behavior. A fourth man was charged with failing to pay child support.

Initially, the girl’s father and grandparents said they did not know Couey. But later, Mark Lunsford’s memory was jogged by a detail police gave him, and he remembered having seen Couey riding his bicycle up and down the street, said Coats, the family’s pastor.

With an autopsy not yet completed, police cannot tell the family how or where Jessica died, Coats said.

“They are hoping he suffocated her in the bedroom and then carried her out, because they say if she had screamed and hollered, they would have heard her,” Coats said. “I’m sure she was sexually molested. It would give them peace of mind to know she died prior to that.”

Jessica’s mother, Angela Bryant, who lives in Ohio, told reporters at a news conference that Couey would pay.

“He’s hurt too many people,” said Bryant, who is divorced from Mark Lunsford.

“He’s hurt too many children,” she said. “And one of them is my daughter. He took her life from her, and she didn’t deserve it. He will pay.”