ST. CHARLES, Mo (KMOX) - Earl Webster Cox, 62, entered a guilty plea in court on Thursday for the 1993 killing of 9-year-old Angie Housman. In a deal with prosecutors, he will receive life in prison without the possibility of parole.
KMOX's Kevin Killeen was in the St. Charles courtroom and describes the scene in the video at the top of this page.
Housman disappeared from her north St. Louis County neighborhood after school in 1993. Her body was found nine days later tied to a tree in the Busch Wildlife area in St. Charles County. An autopsy revealed she had died of hypothermia.
Based on DNA evidence, Cox was charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping and sodomy in June of 2019.
He is a disgraced Air Force veteran with a number of child pornography charges to his name. He showed up on a list of sex offenders compiled four years after Housman died, but he was never interviewed by investigators.
In October of last year, St. Charles County Prosecutor Tim Lohmar said the evidence in the case also pointed to at least one other person that could have been involved. Over the previous few months, Lohmar said detectives had talked with several persons of interest. At that time, Lohmar said his office has spent $20,000 in overtime costs scanning documents onto a computer to preserve all the evidence in the case.
Cox was also charged with two counts of sodomy involving a 7-year-old girl police say he sexually assaulted about four years before Housman disappeared. The alleged attacks took place sometime between 1987 and 1991 in a park behind Housman's grade school.
DNA evidence found at the Housman crime scene led to the charges in that case.