14 DAY TRIAL // Kathlynn Shepard, a teenager kidnapped from Iowa on Monday is still missing as search efforts intensify.
15-year-old Shepard was taken from Dayton in Webster County along with a 12-year-old friend. WHO TV writes that police have found the suspected kidnapper dead in his home in Stratford, in an apparent suicide.
Michael J. Klunder had been convicted of kidnapping and assaulting a 21-year-old woman and abducting two three-year-old girls from Charles City in the 90s.
42-year-old Klunder is being investigated post-mortem in the kidnappings and murders of two other girls in July. The remains of Lyric Cook and Elizabeth Collins were uncovered in December.
While the suspect was convicted to 41 years in jail in 1992, he was out in 2010 and his address was listed as being in the proximity of an elementary school.
He was found dead on Monday, the day he took Shepard and the second girl. The 12-year-old managed to break free and alerted police.
The pair accepted a ride from him as they were waiting in a bus stop after school. They were taken to a house in Pilot Mound.
Police and volunteers are now scouring the area for the missing teen, searching for her on the ground and in the waters of the Des Moines River.
“It’s kind of scary with them out in the water, knowing she could be gone.
“My brother came running through the door and he said this is what happened and I was like I know I just saw it on Facebook, so we got our boots on and went out looking,” describes Joel Dolittle, volunteering in the search mission.
“We had actually been mushroom hunting earlier in the day and we thought we saw the vehicle over there on Skillet so we went back there,” Dolittle recalls.