Body of missing 4-year-old found; mother and boyfriend charged with murder
A 4-year-old child who was last seen more than a year ago has been found dead, and the girl’s mother and her boyfriend have been arrested and charged with murder.
Kentucky State Police said detectives found the body of Serenity McKinney in a wooded area near the Jefferson-Bullitt County line at about 2 p.m. Friday.
Serenity’s mother, Catherine McKinney, 21, and her boyfriend, Dakota Hill, 26, both of Shepherdsville, have been charged with murder and abuse of a corpse, state police announced in a news release Saturday.
State police said the pair were already being held in the Shelby County Detention Center on charges of custodial interference filed by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. They were arrested on those charges in Kansas last week and extradited back to Kentucky, state police said.
The location of the child’s remains was near the 1300 block of Skyview Road in West Point, state police said. An autopsy was to be conducted Saturday morning at the state Medical Examiner’s Office in Louisville.
The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office contacted the state police for help with the investigation Feb. 2, state police said.
The following day, the sheriff’s office shared a photo of Serenity on its Facebook page, saying she was missing and endangered. The post said she was last seen Dec. 24, 2020, family members were concerned and her parents were refusing to cooperate.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office also asked for the public’s help with the case Feb. 3, saying in a news release that extended family members had contacted Shelby County law enforcement that week with concerns that the child was in danger.
“I was hoping that when we filed this report they would just go and she would be there and they would be like, ‘OK, she’s OK, they’re just not having nothing to do with people.,” Serenity’s grandmother, Aundria Wainscott, said in a video shared by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Feb. 10.
“She wouldn’t FaceTime with me and Serenity. She wouldn’t let me see her,” Wainscott said in the video. “That’s when we started thinking, you know, something’s really not right. And we’re very scared.”
State police said the attorney general, sheriff’s office, Secret Service and a number of other law enforcement agencies had helped investigate.
