could establish why he would commit a crime. so police focus their attention on ken otto since he had left a message on shamia s phone several hours before he admitted picking her up. on a hunch shamia s sister decided to try subterfuge. she called ken otto and left a message on his voice mail. i called him to pretend to be shamia. i m like, kenny, it s mia. just wanted to know if you wanted to hook up and call me when you get this message. she never received a phone call back and that was very telling because now you ask yourself why wouldn t he call her back then and ask how she s doing. when police asked ken otto directly if he d ever had a sexual relationship with shamia he said, that was impossible.
taking mr. otto into custody was a pretty proud moment in my life. by his own admission, ken otto picked shamia up for work, but the evidence shows that instead of taking her to the kahoots gentleman s club, he drove 30 miles to his property on the outskirts of town. no one knows what happened after that. just sit down for a second. i have to go to work. sit down. but prosecutors believe that at some point otto shot and killed shamia inside the trailer with a .40 caliber handgun. then he rolled her body in a piece of carpet, creating the bloodstains later found by forensic analysis. then he burned shamia s body for days in the fire pit. when cadaver dogs picked up the scent in the fire pit, otto asked police to leave. and he had eight days to carry
there was heavy burning in the fire pit. there was the smell of fuel. but something else bothered investigators. apparently otto didn t mind the police looking around but the cadaver dogs were another story. he became very upset when the dogs arrived. it appeared to me he was worried that we were going to find something. there is a woodchiper on the property. there s history of cases in the past where people would use wood chippers to dispose of human bodies. at this point convinced he cooperated as much as he needed to, otto asked police to leave. you know what? i need you to wrap this up. all right now. when someone grants a right to search their property, they are entitled to revoke that, but by this time the cadaver dogs had already picked up a scent in the fire pit. one of the dogs found a chunk of flesh that we it appeared
out the most extensive cover-up investigators had ever seen. but he couldn t destroy everything. investigators found shell casings, a spent bullet, shamia s house key. hundreds of bone fragments and even part of her foot, which all told the gruesome tale of a needless murder. i think she was very naive about everyone she knew. like she put her trust in everyone, and you cannot do that. ken otto was tried and convicted of shamia s murder and tampering with evidence. at the end of the day, he s a cold-blooded killer.
property, ken otto is in a full-sized tractor attempting to bury the frame of his 30-foot trailer that was demolished and burned. mr. otto s property looked like manmade hell, a person that was in the process of destroying everything, trees, digging holes, destroying the dirt road that goes into the property. but the one thing that otto hadn t yet destroyed was the fire pit. i was very happy to see that the fire pit hadn t been disrupted all that much. almost immediately detectives got a break. in the embers they found a house key. i took the key, cleaned it up, placed it in the door lock of shamia smith s home and it unlocked and opened the house. so it was shamia smith s house key. but this doesn t prove otto killed her. in the fire pit police also found a spent bullet and three