HARRISONVILLE, Mo. — A man accused of molesting his daughter beginning when she was 5 years old and impregnating her when she was a teenager admitted to detectives that he had sex with her and said he felt it was sometimes her idea.
In a three-hour interview with police, the 47-year-old Cass County man said his daughter, who is now 20, sometimes initiated sex with him. The interview was recorded on video and was played for jurors Monday on the first day of testimony in the man's trial.
In the video, a detective asks him why he thought his daughter wanted to have sex.
He responded: "By the way she acts," he said. "She would rub my shoulder or my back, and I could just tell."
The man has pleaded not guilty to charges that include incest, statutory rape and second-degree murder. The murder charge stems from the death of one of four babies the man is accused of siring with his daughter.
The man is not being identified by The Associated Press to protect the identity of his daughter. He has not addressed the news media about the charges, and his attorney, Janeal Matheson, declined to comment about the case after Monday's proceedings.
The daughter was 14 years old when she had her first baby in the family's recreational vehicle in March 2004 in Oklahoma. The baby died four months later after falling off a couch.
The family moved to Missouri while the baby was still alive and lived for several years in the RV on property owned by the father's mother near Harrisonville in Cass County. The father was arrested in 2009 after one of the daughter's sisters contacted authorities, and investigators found the bodies of two of the babies in coolers buried on the property.
In the police interview, the defendant also said he bought medicine for one of the babies who died because the baby had a high fever, and he felt the medicine would take care of it.
"I didn't know he was that bad," the man said. He also said he did not remember the baby's name.
Earlier Monday, the daughter tearfully recounted the birth of her second child in August 2005. That baby, a boy, was the only one of her four children who survived.
The woman told the jury that her father first started having sexual contact with her when she was 5 years old.
The murder charge stems from the death of the third child after an illness. Prosecutors allege the boy could have been saved at a hospital but that the father refused to get medical attention for him.
"I stayed up with him for two nights and then dozed off for five seconds, and then I woke up and he was dead in my arms," the daughter said. She testified that her father would not seek medical care for the baby because he "didn't want to go to the hospital to see his son with hoses hanging out of him."
With the description of the births and deaths, the daughter began shaking and weeping, her voice and her sobs carrying over the microphone and filling the otherwise silent courtroom. The court recessed twice while she was on the stand so she could compose herself.
The father sat slumped in his chair throughout Monday's proceedings and stared alternately at his daughter and the table in front of him.
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