Police in Clinton, Missouri, said Sandra Kay Sutton, 46, and her 17-year-old son Zachary Wade Sutton were found dead of apparent gunshot wounds early Thursday morning at the home of a family member and that Sutton's former boyfriend and accused kidnapper is a suspect in their deaths. Authorities are searching for James B. Horn, 47, who has been on the run after authorities in Sedalia, Missouri, charged him with kidnapping, armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon in an incident involving Sutton on April 30. Horn is a registered sex offender who served time in prison in an unrelated kidnapping and sexual attack, according to The Associated Press. "The real driving factor in these deaths is absolutely not the victim," he said. Authorities were also searching for Horn in abandoned homes in the area, after an officer found Sutton's car near a local hospital. Surveillance video from the hospital showed a man authorities believe was Horn walking away from the car and toward nearby houses at 4:15 a.m., the lieutenant said. They surrounded the home for hours, calling to Horn to come out and deploying a robot to search the area, but officers found no one once they went inside, said Sgt. The Missouri State Highway Patrol SWAT team and local law enforcement surrounded Horn's home in Sedalia earlier Thursday afternoon, but were unable to find him upon entering, Sgt. Lowe said authorities had searched and cleared at least two abandoned homes in the area and have not found Horn. Federal authorities also are helping search for Horn, who is currently under the supervision of federal probation officers. Lynch said Sutton had not sought an order of protection against Horn and authorities did not know she was staying with relatives in Clinton, but that Horn had an outstanding warrant for his arrest in the alleged kidnapping incident. The woman said that she had been kept against her will since January, and had been imprisoned in a wooden box at the residence. Horn served about three years in prison in Tennessee in the early 1990s in connection with a kidnapping and sexual attack. Records also show he pleaded guilty in 1997 in Mississippi to unlawfully kidnapping and abducting his estranged wife. He was released from custody in December 2011, and his probation jurisdiction was transferred in 2012 to Missouri, according to online court records.
– A fugitive suspect who allegedly kept a woman captive in a wooden box for months may have surfaced to murder her and her son, according to police in Missouri. James Barton Horn Jr. has been on the run since the end of April, when Sandra Sutton ran to a neighbor's house and said he had been locking her in the box whenever he wasn't home, the Kansas City Star reports. When police were called, they found the plywood box—100 inches long, 48 inches wide, and 52 inches tall, according to the AP—and discovered Horn had fled. Yesterday, Sutton and her 17-year-old son were found shot dead at the home of a family member, and police say Horn is a suspect, NBC News reports. The family member's home is in Clinton, nearly 50 miles away from Horn's home in Sedalia. According to the Sedalia Democrat, Sutton told police that her relationship with Horn began as consensual but then led to "you can't leave." Police warn that Horn, 47, is an "extremely dangerous, violent person," and the AP reports that he has a long and disturbing criminal past. Records show that he spent three years in prison in Tennessee in the early '90s for a kidnapping and rape; at the end of 2011, he finished a 13-year sentence for kidnapping his estranged wife in Mississippi. A police spokesman in Clinton tells the Star that authorities were unaware that Sutton was living in the city and she had apparently declined to seek a protection order—though he adds that it may not have helped, because "he'd done these things and he was on the run."