forehead, and she’s crimson in the face,
as if she’s just been almost choked to
death.
A distraught woman came forward
to identify the victim as her daughter
Michelle Ricci, who’d been missing
for several weeks. Thirty-six-year-old
Michelle was a friend of Marsha Spicer
and she, too, had struggled with meth
addiction.I
f anything, her fate was even crueller
than Marsha’s. After she’d agreed to
sleep with Dena and Davis in exchange
for meth, the couple controlled her
with drugs and kept her as a sex slave
for three days, subjecting her to rape,
beatings, torture and choking.
She was still alive after several days of
abuse but Davis, fearing she’d go to the
police if they released her, decided she
must die. They bound her with electric
wire and drove to nearby woods where
Davis tried to strangle her with rope.
When that failed, he suffocated her.
Concerned about leaving evidence,
the killers returned the following day,
drenched her body with lighter fuel and
set it alight. Police found the charred
corpse a month later.
Just 36 hours after waving goodbye
to detectives, Dena and Davis had gone
from obscure perverts to accused sex
murderers at the top of America’s Most
Wanted list.
Their pursuit became national news
as police tracked them via their mobile
phone calls and credit card purchases.
Over the next five days, they
zig-zagged across Missouri to St. Louis,
stopping at the small town of Perryville
where Dena had a friend. The couple
told her they had “raped and killed
a lady,” and that they planned to go
somewhere and kill themselves.
But they backtracked west to Kansas
City where they bought more meth, and
then drove south across the Missouri
state line to the village of Arcadia – home
of Davis’s sister, brother-in-law and
five-year-old niece.
Unaware that they were wanted by
police, the sister put them up for the
night and said later that her brother made
an elaborate display of his new-found
Christianity.evidence awaiting them. A video showed
Dena and Davis repeatedly raping,
sodomising, beating and strangling
Marsha Spicer for a full two hours.
The petite mother-of-two was bound at
the wrists, pinned to Davis’s bed, and had
duct tape wound over her eyes during the
horrific torture.
At one point, she’s heard screaming
and crying. Several minutes later she begs
them to stop. After more screams, Dena’s
voice tells her to be quiet. Elsewhere, she
can be heard gasping for air.
In the end, as her head drops to
her chest and she’s near death from
strangulation, Dena grotesquely sits on
her face and suffocates her.
The tape was in the player when
detectives arrived, which meant the
couple had been watching it recently.
District Attorney Michael Sanders
said: “Senior officers who watched this
tape had to have time off and stress
counselling. It’s the most disturbing thing
I’ve ever seen. For two hours we have a
woman who begs for her life at various
times throughout the assault. She’s struck
with open fists, closed fists, strangled,
sexually assaulted in all imaginable and
unimaginable ways, and at the end she
dies. We have watched an actual murder.”
Another video of Marsha being
tortured was found in Davis’s locker at
his work.
Under the bed at the apartment,
detectives also found a second shocking
tape showing another woman being
tortured by the couple. To try and
identify her, they distributed a still photo
from it, which unavoidably showed her in
distress, staring wide-eyed and terrified
at the camera. A vein bulges on herDena and Davis captured. Even as they were pursued by the authorities
the couple abducted and sexually assaulted a child. They were captured
before they could put their suicide plan into actionMarsha Spicer and Michelle Ricci. Both were filmed being sexually
assaulted, tortured and begging for their lives before being murdered