Murder victim's family speaks out

No longer can the family stay silent.

The family that was devastated by the actions of a notorious crime couple, Dena Riley and Richard Davis, cannot hold in their opinions any longer.

Chrissie Mays and Brenda Sartain are sisters. Their aunt, Marsha Spicer, was suffocated to death by Dena Riley when she sat on Spicer’s face during a forced sexual act.

More than three years have passed since they lost their Marsha. It’s been more than three years since that horrible day in May when Riley and Davis videotaped the violent rape, torture and murder of their Marsha.

Davis was sentenced to death for the crime. Riley was sentenced to nine consecutive life sentences without parole.

 Mays and Sartain are publicly talking for the first time since Davis’ jury trial in summer 2008. What compelled them to open up was the sentence Riley received in federal court two weeks ago.

On Sept. 14, a federal judge in Kansas sentenced Riley to another life sentence for kidnapping a 5-year-old girl from rural Southeast Kansas days after killing Spicer. Davis and Riley drove the child – a relative of Davis – to a wooded area near Lamar, Mo., and sexually molested her to the point that she needed hospitalization.

It was a part of Davis and Riley’s crime spree that shocked and outraged the Kansas City metro area. 

Another life sentence for Riley probably means little to her, Mays said.

“I see no justice for the little girl,” Mays said. “I mean, when she gets a life sentence, it’s only a slap on the wrist to her.”

The family is praying and thinking about the little girl, how she’s coping.  “I think about her every day,” she said. “I would like to hug her.”

Mays says of Riley: “For the rest of the time she’s alive, I hope that she sees their faces, especially that little girl, every moment of every day. I hope it eats her mind. But it won’t.”

No, the family wants Riley to pay the ultimate price: death by execution.

“I don’t think she deserves to breathe,” Sartain said. 

They want her to die for Marsha Spicer, for the little girl, and for Michelle Huff-Ricci, a woman who they also allegedly raped and tortured on video-tape before they did the same thing to Spicer.

Davis is accused of killing Huff-Ricci in a wooded area in Clay County after he failed to strangle her back at the apartment during the violent threesome in April 2008. Prosecutors allege he went back to the death scene and set her body on fire.

Late last year, Jackson County prosecutors and the family discussed whether to offer a plea deal to Riley. She would plead guilty to save herself from death row in exchange for consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

 Spicer’s family agreed to allow prosecutors to go with the plea bargain. The alternative would be to pursue the death penalty, which would have required a lengthy jury trial. Jurors more than likely would find Riley guilty. But the jury also could not sentence her to death. Sartain and Mays said prosecutors expressed concern that Riley might get parole had prosecutors not offered the plea deal.

“It was a jeopardy we couldn’t take,” Sartain said. “We couldn’t take a risk of her seeing the light of day. The choice we made was the only choice we had at the time. I believe we made the right choice in accepting the guilty plea.”

Sartain still holds out hope that justice will prevail. Riley is facing a grand jury indictment in Clay County, possibly for charges of first-degree murder. However, the grand jury has not unsealed the indictment. Although Sartain did not say it outright, she wants the family of Huff-Ricci to seek the death penality.

Also, the family did not want to go through another jury trial. The painful details of the Davis trial still haunt Mays and Sartain.

During the trial, prosecutors showed an image of a dead Marsha Spicer, her body contorted in a shallow dirt grave in a heavily wooded area near Bates City.

“I couldn’t handle it,” said Mays, who jumped to her feet after the image flashed on an overhead projector in the courtroom.

“I wanted to attack him (Davis) so bad in court,” Mays said. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I had the flash of grabbing that metal chair in front of me and just whacking Richard Davis in the back of his head.”

But each time those flashes appeared, Mays refrained. “I didn’t want to disturb the trial.”

Riley’s defense, which was brought up in the Davis trial, was that she was on drugs at the time and the drugs led to the criminal actions.

Mays said that’s a bogus excuse.

Next month will mark six years that Mays has been clean of drugs. She spent years on drugs – methamphetamine mostly – as she plodded along in life.

“But I never hurt nobody,” Mays said. “I never killed nobody.”

Drugs, she said, make you stupid. But they don’t alter your reality enough to kill women and molest a young girl.

“They just give you the ‘I don’t care’ attitude to do it,” Mays said.

No, you have to be a sick, twisted person before drugs rush through your bloodstream, Mays said. You have to be a special type of psychopath to go on the type of crime spree Riley and Davis embarked that summer, she said.

“I don’t care how much dope you’re on, you’re not going to do something like that,” Mays said. “She’s a very sick animal to do something like that.”

Mays did not see her aunt for several months before Spicer died. Mays had moved to Warrensburg to start a new life, to get away from Independence and the drugs. She wanted Marsha to move to Warrensburg.

Spicer’s mother died when she was young, so Sartain and Mays’ mother took in Spicer. The family grew up in Independence, the Fort Osage area.

Sartain lived about six blocks from where Marsha was killed in Richard Davis’s apartment on Truman Road.

“I just wish I could’ve heard her screams. I wish I could have helped her out.”