A homeless man posed for photographs with his dead wife, along with their newborn and toddler, before dismembering her body in a Kansas City hotel room, court records showed.
Justin Rey, 35, who was arrested last month after being found with the remains at a Kansas storage unit, was on Wednesday charged with abandonment of a corpse and child endangerment in Jackson County, Missouri.
He was jailed on a US$1 million bond in Johnson County, Kansas, on child endangerment charges.
Rey told police that his wife, Jessica Monteiro Rey, died after giving birth on Oct. 20 and that he dismembered her body in a bathtub two days later with the children present.
Rey put some of her body parts in a large cooler, a Kansas City police detective wrote in the probable cause statement.
He used a stove to boil parts that would not fit in the cooler and flushed some of the remains down the toilet, the statement said.
Hotel management said Rey tried to disguise his voice as a woman’s when he called the front desk to check out on Oct. 23, the statement said.
Surveillance video footage shows him pulling a red cooler with a black bag on top through the hotel, while pushing a stroller with a toddler walking beside him.
Police found the remains on Oct. 24 inside a cooler and tote at a U-Haul Moving and Storage facility in nearby Lenexa, Kansas, after Rey slept there with the children.
Local emergency responders checked on the children, who were later taken to hospital.
The affidavit said the baby was not wearing adequate clothing and had an eye infection.
After Rey was arrested and put in a police vehicle, he was asked about his wife’s whereabouts.
He responded that she had died several days earlier and was in the cooler, and one of the totes, which he had been trying to remove from the storage unit, court records showed.
The probable cause statement said the hotel room’s bathtub train was removed and apparent human tissue was found. Traces of blood were also detected throughout the room.
Rey provided conflicting information about his wife’s death. He said that his wife committed suicide after giving birth and also that she died during or after childbirth, the probable cause statement said.
Rey had a series of run-ins with the law in the northwestern Arizona communities of Lake Havasu City, Kingman, Williams and Flagstaff between 2012 and December last year for relatively minor offenses.
Court records show eight cases, including four for theft and a pair of citations for driving without a valid license and insurance, and a probation violation case.
The records show he pleaded guilty in five cases and mainly faced fines, while two others were dismissed. He never served time in an Arizona state prison.
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