Kidnapping case draws attention to lack of database of deceased

Suspect was legally declared dead in 1994

November 16, 2010|Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. — On paper he was deceased, legally declared dead 16 years ago. In reality, Thomas Steven Sanders had lived openly for years without anyone noticing that fact, until his weekend arrest on suspicion of kidnapping a Las Vegas girl who recently turned up dead.

Sanders was arrested Sunday at a Gulfport, Miss., truck stop after a massive nationwide manhunt and charged with kidnapping 12-year-old Lexis Roberts, whose body was found last month in Louisiana, the FBI said. The girl’s mother, 31-year-old Suellen Roberts, is missing and feared dead in a bizarre case that leaves many wondering how a legally dead man can go unnoticed for so long, even after being arrested in several states under his real name.

Authorities say the answer is simple: Theres is no national death database in the United States, said James Kelly, sheriff of Catahoula Parish in central Louisiana, where the girl’s skeleton was found by hunters in October. Authorities yesterday pressed Sanders, 53, for more information about the girl’s missing mother, and he was cooperating with law enforcement agents, Kelly said.

Much of Sanders’s past is a mystery since he walked out on his family in McComb, Miss., in 1987. He drifted from state to state and didn’t buy property or establish many bills in his name, authorities said.

His wife, Candice Sanders, divorced him in 1988 for allegedly “habitual, cruel, and inhuman treatment.’’

In July 1994, Sanders’s parents, brother, and ex-wife petitioned a Mississippi court to have him declared dead. Sanders moved around the country using his real name. He worked as a laborer, a welder, and a scrap metal collector. He was arrested several times, and was sentenced to two years in Georgia for simple battery.

In Nevada, Sanders met Roberts and her daughter Lexis a few months ago at a storage facility, Roberts’s mother Mary Woodburn has told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. The trio was in Williams and Flagstaff, Ariz., and the Grand Canyon National Park over the Labor Day weekend, authorities added. Hunters found Lexis’s remains on Oct. 8. There was evidence she had been shot.