Sappington searched for three weeks before finding his first victim.  Despite Sappington’s perambulations in search of a stranger, the person he alighted upon was a neighborhood friend.

Terry Green, victim

Terry T. Green, 25, was a longtime friend of Sappington’s.  They would often spend time at each other’s homes. So there was nothing atypical when Green showed up unannounced at Sappington’s door on April 7, 2001. It was, Davenport later said, just an extreme case of “being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Soon, according to Sappington, the voices took over.  They told him to lure Green to the basement of his mother’s home. They also told Sappington to attack Green with a hunting knife that he had hidden in one of the basement’s corners.

The slaying happened with such fury and ferocity that the walls of the basement were splattered with blood, crime scene investigators noted. With Green lifeless on the floor, the voices allegedly told Sappington that they had one more command for him.

Obeying the voices, Sappington later said, he knelt down over the body of his friend, and began to lap up his blood.  But Sappington left the task unfinished.  He heard a noise and the voices told Sappington to dispose of the body immediately.

Sappington could not have picked a more obvious place to dump Green’s remains.  Using his mother’s car, Sappington crossed the river and entered Kansas City, Missouri.  Sappington then drove to the edge of a parking lot at a nightclub he and Green frequented. He dumped the covered body into a car’s backseat.

Of course it didn’t take long for the Missouri police to find the body.  The Missouri police saw the homicide as a Missouri crime.  Although Kansas City, Kansas, authorities heard about the discovery, they were simply relieved that they did not have another murder on their hands.

“We heard about it,” said Gorman, the Kansas prosecutor. “But we figured it was their murder and we have enough murders of our own.”

It took police three days to link Sappington to Green’s murder.  But now that his killing spree was finally underway, Sappington managed to kill two more people before his capture.