Missing Kentucky mother Savannah Spurlock was found dead in a shallow grave, investigators said in court on July 15.
Spurlock, 23, was found at a house in Garrard County on July 10.
Detective Tye Chavies with Kentucky State Police, who is working on the case, appeared in Garrard District Court on Monday and said troopers found Spurlock’s body buried in a shallow grave, naked, wrapped in a rug and garbage bags, reported WKYT.
Detectives believe David Sparks, one of the men seen leaving a bar with Spurlock in January before she vanished and who lives in the home where the body was found, took the rug and bags from his house and buried her in them.
Phone messages obtained by the authorities showed Sparks texted his sister on Jan. 4, the night Spurlock disappeared, and asked where she had bought a rug because he wanted to buy a new one. He was spotted on surveillance footage from a nearby Walmart buying a rug that was matched to the rug that Kentucky mother was found buried in.
Family and friends who were at the hearing said the new details left them unsettled.
“A lot of stuff that he revealed that we didn’t know,” Spurlock’s friend Sabrina Speratos told WKYT. “I personally didn’t know. That was rough. It’s emotional. It’s hard to talk about. You hope to never hear anything like that. It’s pretty gruesome.”
“Of course it’s hard to turn in your own child, but at the same time I can imagine what his dad would have felt like … if he realized his [own] daughter was laying in someone’s backyard for so long as well,” Speratos added outside Monday’s preliminary hearing, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader, referring to Sparks’s father being the one to call the police.
“Not only was it a courtesy thing, but maybe he didn’t want to get in trouble as well. I think all this time he believed his son—I think everyone did. With the background they came from, I think they felt he wasn’t lying to them.”
Sparks has been charged with abusing a corpse and tampering with physical evidence in connection with the found remains.
Savannah Spurlock’s father leaves the courthouse after hearing testimony of the man charged after Savannah’s body was found last week. More on what the state police detective said in court and reaction at noon and later @WKYT @WYMT https://t.co/ZWYs9H9aU7 pic.twitter.com/rtOxcEnHNB
— Phil Pendleton (@philtvnews) July 15, 2019
Savannah’s family and friends are grateful that they will be able to lay her to rest, said Sabrina Speratos, Savannah’s best friend. She said after so much time had passed they weren’t sure that that was going to be possible. pic.twitter.com/3YBeJ6I6bZ
— Morgan Eads (@MorganEads1) July 15, 2019
The other two men seen with Spurlock have not been charged and Spurlock’s cause of death hasn’t been announced.
Sparks was ordered to remain in prison without bond until a judge reviews the case and decides whether to grant him bond. Garrard County Judge Bill Oliver said there was probable cause to shift the case to a grand jury.
Chavies, the detective, said on Monday that Sparks told police that Spurlock and the three other men went to his house in the early morning hours of Jan. 4. The two other men later left and Spurlock went to sleep in Sparks’s bed while he went to bed on the couch, reported the Herald-Leader.
The next morning, Spurlock woke up and asked Sparks what the address for the house was. Sparks said he told her and went back to sleep. When he woke up again, she had vanished.
Detectives said a bloodstain consistent with the victim’s DNA was found inside a closet in the bedroom. It wasn’t visible but it wasn’t known whether someone had attempted to clean it up.
