State v. Stout

591 S.W.2d 225, 1979 Mo. App. LEXIS 3078
CourtMissouri Court of Appeals
DecidedDecember 3, 1979
DocketNo. KCD 30354
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 591 S.W.2d 225 (State v. Stout) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Missouri Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Stout, 591 S.W.2d 225, 1979 Mo. App. LEXIS 3078 (Mo. Ct. App. 1979).

Opinion

KENNEDY, Judge.

The defendant Ray Gene Stout was convicted upon jury trial in the Circuit Court of Randolph County of the crime of kidnapping for ransom as defined by § 559.230, RSMo 1969. He was sentenced in accordance with the jury verdict to 25 years’ imprisonment by the Division of Corrections. From that judgment defendant has appealed to this court.

Appellant’s first point goes to the sufficiency of the evidence. We find that the evidence was sufficient to support the charge and verdict, and we rule this point against the appellant.

We here copy subsection (1) of § 559.230, RSMo 1969, under which defendant was charged: “If any person shall willfully, without lawful authority, seize, confine, inveigle,, decoy, kidnap, abduct, take or carry away by any means, or attempt so to do, any other person and attempt or cause such other person to be secretly confined against his will, or abduct for the purpose and with the intention of causing anyone else, to pay or offer to pay any sum as ransom or reward for the return or release of the other person or with the intention and purpose of requiring anyone to perform some specific act for the return or release of the other person, the person or persons so guilty of [227]*227the' above mentioned acts or act, shall, on conviction, be punished by imprisonment by the division of corrections for not less than five years.” § 559.230(1).

We will now recount the evidence, all of which was presented by the state. The defendant presented none.

Sheila Jo Embree returned to her apartment from her employment as a realty office secretary at about four o'clock in the afternoon of Friday, December 23, 1977. At about 4:30 the doorbell rang. A man later identified as Marion Holloway was at the door. She admitted him to the house to use the telephone. He dialed a number and Sheila, sitting nearby, heard a busy signal. He then produced a small black gun, and forced Sheila to lie down on the floor. He wiped his fingerprints from the phone, using a towel from the kitchen. He tied Sheila’s hands behind her back and blindfolded her with tape.

Sheila heard a second person enter through the back door and heard them rummage through her purse. One of the two ran up the stairs of the townhouse apartment and shortly came back down. They whispered to each other but Sheila could not understand what they were saying.

The men then conducted Sheila out the back door to a car on the parking lot. She could see under the tape blindfold and recognized the grass and the parking lot gravel and knew where she was being taken. She was placed in the back seat of a two-door car. The two men got in the car, closed the door and drove out on the driveway. Sheila was lying down in the back seat in compliance with their instructions.

Sheila was able later, by reference to stops, turns, railroad tracks and road surfaces, to describe the route which the car followed out of the City of Moberly and, more vaguely, their trip through the countryside.

At length they turned into a house with a gravel driveway, off a paved or blacktop road. The car stopped and Sheila was led into the house. She was placed on a bed and was given a pillow and a green Army blanket. During all the time she was kept at the house and until her release, she was not allowed off the bed except to go to the rest room. At least one other person was in the house besides the two who had transported her there. Her captors ultimately proved to be three in number — Holloway, the defendant Stout, and a third man, named Sidney Allen Robb.

The next day in daylight Sheila was able to observe from under the blindfold several features of the room where she was kept— carpet, drapes, bed, electric heater, and the adjoining bathroom — which enabled her to identify the place later.

On Friday evening Sheila heard one of her two captors say, “We have got to go call Joe”. The voice sounded familiar. She heard the same voice twice the next morning, Saturday. She began to suspect that it was the voice of Ray Gene Stout. On Saturday afternoon she saw and recognized the defendant Stout through the blindfold.

Sheila Jo had been acquainted with the defendant Stout for a considerable period of time. He had worked for her father’s basement construction business at Sturgeon while she was still in high school before 1971, and until 1974. The defendant, his wife and son had come to her parents’ lake for picnics and fishing. Defendant and his wife came to Sheila Jo’s wedding in September, 1972. Although she might have seen the defendant once or twice since that time, it had been at least four years since she had seen him.

On Saturday evening the person she had recognized as Stout told Sheila Jo that “he came from a family where if his mother knew what he had done it would break her heart” and “where his brothers had given his parents a lot of trouble”. Twice he asked her if she recognized his voice, and she told him that she did not. He said he was from California. He told her she was being held for $25,000 ransom.

Later on that night the others, who had been absent from the house while Stout kept Sheila Jo under guard, returned to the house with the ransom money, overjoyed and excited. They divided the money in the [228]*228room where Sheila was being kept. Holloway gave Sheila a $50 bill, explaining to her that that was in payment for the money they had taken from her billfold “plus interest”. The $50 bill was later identified as part of the ransom money.

Sheila was placed in the same car which was used to bring her to the house. Two of the men took her to a point near her parents’ house near Sturgeon and let her out of the car. At about 12:30 a. m. Sunday morning, Christmas day, she arrived at her parents’ house. She was in a disheveled and highly emotional state.

Dwayne Embree, husband of Sheila, and Joe Robinson, her father, testified to receiving a telephone call at the Embree residence in Moberly after Sheila’s disappearance on Friday evening. The call, taken by Joe Robinson, Sheila’s father, told him where he could find a note behind the buildings at his lumberyard in Sturgeon. Sturgeon is 16 miles from Moberly. They located the note, which was addressed to Joe Robinson and Dwayne Embree, and which named a ransom price of $25,000. The note said that they would receive later instructions by telephone where to take the money. The next evening Robinson received the call with the instructions. He was to take the “Tri-City Lake Road to the first curve, and I would find a Dr. Pepper bottle sitting in the road; for me to put the money by the bottle, and back my car back to the blacktop, head toward Centralia, and blink my lights twice, and drive on”. Robinson complied with the instructions.

The money, in a City Bank cloth bag, with the words “City Bank and Trust” written thereon, contained the money in $20, $50 and $100 bills. The cloth bag was placed inside a brown paper sack.

Sheila’s observations enabled her to locate and identify the house on Monday, which was unoccupied at the time they located it. Located under the mattress of the bed was $9,960 of the ransom money, and the cloth bag.

Other evidence showed that defendant Ray Gene Stout had rented the house where Sheila was kept, on December 19th, under the name of “Jack Beach”, and had paid $75 rent. With the help of witness Richard Bell, who had directed defendant Stout to this particular house, he had moved a wood frame bed into the house.

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Related

State v. Webb
569 S.W.3d 530 (Missouri Court of Appeals, 2018)
State v. Cameron
604 S.W.2d 653 (Missouri Court of Appeals, 1980)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
591 S.W.2d 225, 1979 Mo. App. LEXIS 3078, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-stout-moctapp-1979.