KANSAS CITY (AP) — Authorities have announced that a man already in prison for a separate crime has been charged in the 2018 killing of a Kansas City woman whose body was found in rural wooded area months after she disappeared.
Kenneth Wilson Jr., 32, of Cameron, has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of 18-year-old Vernece Brown.
Brown’s remains were found by mushroom hunters in May 2018 in a wooded area near Harrisonville, about 35 miles south of Kansas City. She had been missing since Valentine’s Day of that year. An autopsy showed she had been fatally shot.
Cellphone data shows Brown had been communicating with Wilson and that their cellphones were in the same location about the time she disappeared, police said.
Wilson is already in custody at the Western Missouri Correctional Center serving a sentence for a separate crime. Court records show he was arrested in 2018 while driving a stolen vehicle that was carjacked from a woman in Columbia.