​The man who forced a 15-year old girl into the back of his van, robbed her and began to undress her has been caught. Charles B. Smith, 26, is charged with kidnapping, attempted forcible rape, first degree robbery and three counts of armed criminal action.

The assault happened at 6 a.m. Monday morning in the 7500 block of Pennsylvania Avenue in St. Louis as the girl was walking to her bus stop.

Police say Smith forced her into his van at knife point and drove her to a garage. There he took her cell phone and backpack and removed her clothes in preparation for a sexual assault. The girl was able to fight her way free (biting him in the hand), and escaped from the car.

The judge ordered Smith held without bond.

Killer could face lethal injection.

​A jury yesterday recommended the death penalty for Vernell Loggins Jr., a trucker from suburban St. Louis who captured headlines in 2009 when his girlfriend's dismembered body was found outside the Pacific apartment complex where the two lived.

A maintenance worker discovered the headless corpse of Stephanie Fields under bags of ice in a trash can that had been glued shut. Her head was later discovered in the Meramec River. Other body parts were discovered in a nearby woods.
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​Mark Daniel Obrien, 40, has been charged with statutory sodomy, child molestation, possession of child pornography and child abuse in conjunction with two boys younger than ten. Both boys were in Obrien's custody as foster children at the time of the alleged crimes.

Obrien, of Republic, Missouri, had been active in the foster parent program for close to a decade, but is not an active parent at this time. He had protective custody of 50 children during those ten years -- all of them boys.

The two victims told adults about the abuse after leaving Obrien's care, independently of each other. The Republic Police Department probable cause statements also note:

"(The boy) also stated that Mark had anal sex with him on multiple occasions and would videotape these acts with his video recorder."

Police did find child pornography on Obrien's computer. 

Tessa Vanvlerah

​Tessa Vanvlerah, the Ballwin mother accused of prostituting her daughter to a college professor from California in 2010, pleaded guilty last week in St. Louis Circuit Court to statutory rape, statutory sodomy and incest involving the now two-year-old child.

Federal prosecutors also accuse Vanvlerah and Kenneth Kyle, of San Francisco, of producing child pornography when Kyle would travel to St. Louis to allegedly molest Vanlerah's infant daughter. But here's where the case grows even more twisted.

It's now been reported that in 2008 a St. Louis woman successfully received a restraining order against Vanvlerah, on claims that Vanvlerah seduced and had sex with the woman's 16-year-old autistic son. Vanvlerah then allegedly bragged online that she'd gotten pregnant from the affair.
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Kevin Wayne Weckherlin

​Hot tub? Check. Neckbeard? Check. Pleading guilty to first degree statutory sodomy with an underage relative? Check, please.

Kevin Wayne Weckherlin, 30, of Warrenton, yesterday pleaded guilty to the charges leveled against him in October of 2010 and received a thirteen year sentence. Weckherlin was in a hot tub at the St. Peters Rec-Plex with a female minor -- whom he was related to -- when another patron spotted him molesting the girl. This patron notified the life guard, who then notified park rangers, who then presumably moved in and apprehended Weckherlin.

Commenters who purported to be relatives of Weckherlin's chimed in on the original 2010 story concerning his arrest to claim that Weckherlin has slightly diminished mental capabilities. The beard would seem to confirm that, even more so than his sexual assault of a minor in a public pool on a Friday afternoon.

Dennis Iagulli

​Dennis Iagulli pleaded guilty yesterday to his role in a truly disturbing murder of a fellow homeless man in June 2010.

Parts of 22-year-old Zachary Irvin's body were found on fire that month near an abandoned East St. Louis warehouse that served as a homeless camp. Authorities have long held that Iagulli and a fellow vagrant by the name of James Pierson attacked Irvin because they believed he had started a fight with some of their friends.

Following yesterday's guilty plea, those authorities now have an all too vivid account of what occurred.
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2011 marked the end of an era: St. Louis is no longer the Most Dangerous City in America. Not only did our city lose the coveted number-one spot, now held by Flint, Michigan, it slipped to number four! And it looks as though the city's murder rate will decline by 30 percent from 2010. What's going on here?

Nonetheless, there were still some pretty grisly crimes in St. Louis this year. Here, then, is a look at ten of the most heinous crimes (ranked from bad to worse) occurring in and around St. Louis within the past 12 months.

Kim McGee and Keith Rucker: Not the parents of the year.

​10. Trapped in the Closet

And not in the R. Kelly sense. Last February, during a compliance check of Kim McGee and Keith Rucker's home in Cahokia, U.S. marshals discovered two five-year-olds, a boy and a girl, locked inside a three-by-four foot closet. The door was secured with a nail.

Turns out McGee and Rucker had been punishing the kids this way for at least five months, locking them up for as long as four hours at a time. It was unclear whether any of the other three kids living in the house got locked up, too, but the Department of Children and Family Services took all five into custody. McGee and Rucker were arrested on six counts of child endangerment and held in the St. Clair County jail.

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Bradley Cook: Here's betting his prison name will be "PutHim2GoodUse."

​Bradley Cook of Kirkwood pleaded guilty today in federal court in Kansas City to commercial sex trafficking of a young, mentally deficient woman who prosecutors says was coerced into being a sex slave for several years while she was tortured in a trailer home located in a wooded area outside Lebanon, Missouri.

Cook, also known as "PutHer2GoodUse," admitted to commercial sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion.

In an announcement today federal prosecutors say that Cook watched the victim, identified in court documents as "FV" (female victim), being sexually abused and tortured in live online sessions and as depicted in photos and videos that he downloaded from the Internet. Cook, 33, admitted that he traveled to Lebanon on multiple occasions between 2006 and 2009 to engage in sessions of sexual acts and torture with the victim. In exchange, Cook paid the victim's "master" for these sessions with such items as computer hard drives that contained images and videos of bondage, domination, sadism and masochism, which he had downloaded from the Internet.
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Twanna Washington

​An Overland mother is behind bars following a violent fight with her teenage son that sent the boy to the hospital with a bullet wound.

St. Louis County police say that Twanna Washington and her 16-year-old son were visiting relatives in 2100 block of McLaran in Jennings on December 15 when they got into an argument that turned into a physical altercation.

Washingon, 30, pulled out a handgun during the fight that police say discharged, striking the teen.

Washington, of the 200 block of Kelan in Overland, was charged Friday with second-degree assault and armed criminal action. Her bail was set at $25,000.

The victim was in stable condition at a St. Louis hospital late last week.

Melvin Patton: Promise Keeper

​A St. Louis jury yesterday convicted Melvin Patton of two counts of first-degree murder for the killings of 24-year-old Keneka Elliott and her 29-year-old brother Julius Elliott.

Patton, 26, wore a mask when he burst into a home in south St. Louis in April 2010 and shot the victims in front of his then 4-year-old son and other children. A third woman was also shot in the melee but survived.

Prosecutors say that Patton's son begged to no avail for his father to spare the lives of his mother and uncle.
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