A pair of girl’s pants led searchers to the body of missing 11-year-old Audrii Cunningham in the Trinity River on Tuesday after she’d been missing for nearly a week.
Tim Miller, the founder of Texas EquuSearch, told CrimeOnline’s Nancy Grace that he spotted the pants along the bank of the river on Saturday.
“Not the backpack,” Miller said, saying he didn’t want to disclose what item it was.
“It was definitely clothing. And it’s defnitely hers,” said Miller, finally answering “Yeah” when Grace asks if it was “her pants.”
Miller said it took a few more days to locate the body in the fast-moving river, and then only after state authorities reduced the water flow from Lake Livingston Dam.
But, he said, if the little girl hadn’t been weighed down with a heavy rock, the river current would have taken her body dozens of miles away.
As CrimeOnline reported, Cunningham’s body was found tied to a rope attached to a large rock. Court documents say the rope is consistent with rope found in 42-year-old Don Steven McDougal’s vehicle days earlier during a traffic stop.
McDougal, initially arrested on unrelated charges, has now been charged with murder in the 11-year-old’s death. But it wasn’t the first time he’d been caught with children. In 2007, authorities allowed him to plead guilty to enticing a child — which didn’t require him to register as a sex offender.
McDougal lived in a trailer in the back of Cunningham’s father’s house. The father left the little girl alone with the man with the Nazi tattoos when he went to work that morning, and Cunningham never got on her bus for school.
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[Featured image: Audrii Cunningham/Polk County Sheriffs Office and Don Steven McDougal/Montgomery County Jail]
