Above right: Samuel and Lindsey Porter. Left: Daniel Porter in 2004
INDEPENDENCE, Mo. (AP) — A man who has refused to reveal the whereabouts of his children to his ex-wife and authorities for almost two years was sentenced Friday to 38 years in prison for kidnapping.
Daniel Porter, 43, already was serving a 10-year sentence on a federal weapons charged. Besides receiving the maximum sentences on four kidnapping charges Friday, he also was sentenced to three years in prison for parole violations. The sentences are to run consecutively.
Porter’s children have been missing since June 2004, when he picked them up from his ex-wife for a weekend visit. Since then, investigators have scoured the Kansas City suburbs of Independence and Sugar Creek and searched the area around Porter’s hometown of Trenton in northern Missouri, but they have come up with nothing.
Porter has given varying accounts of the fates of Sam and Lindsey — that they were sold for $6,001, that they were strangled and thrown in a river, even that they had become part of a pornography ring.
Porter was convicted in February of two counts each of parental kidnapping and parental kidnapping with intent to terrorize. Jurors rejected the defense’s argument that Porter’s only goal was to protect his children from an abusive childhood like his own.
UPDATE: A request for a link to www.samandlindsey.org
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