Angie Housman: Louisiana girl was raped, tied to a tree to die by veteran who was jailed for life AFTER 27 years
ST CHARLES, LOUISIANA: After 27 years of hurt, the family of Angie Housman can breathe a sigh of relief, with the disgraced Air Force veteran accused in her death admitting to the crime and being told he would be spending the rest of his life behind bars.
Angie was just nine years old when she disappeared from her school bus stop in November 1993 in St Ann, sparking a massive search operation, according to the St Louis Post-Dispatch. Her body was found by a deer hunter on November 27, 1993, nine days after her abduction, in a remote area of Busch Wildlife Area in St Charles County. She had been tied naked to a tree, bound, gagged, and her eyes and mouth had been covered with duct tape. She had been tortured and sexually assaulted before she died of hypothermia from the exposure to the cold, an autopsy determined. Authorities also said they believed she had died just a few hours before the hunter came across her body.
The gruesome nature of the killing saw residents of St Louis panic. Besides Angie, two other young girls had been murdered in the area the same year, and the attention her death drew saw the authorities open an intense investigation into the case. Dozens of detectives were assigned to look into the killing and a tip line dedicated to the investigation received more than 5,000 calls in just one day from people claiming they had information about her killer.
But it would take more than 25 years, and significant advancements in DNA technology, for the authorities to finally make a breakthrough. In early 2019, a St Charles County forensic scientist analyzed pieces of clothing found at the 1993 scene to look for evidence and extracted DNA from a scrap of her underwear. The DNA was then matched to a sample from Earl W Cox, 63, a convicted pedophile and Air Force veteran, from a national database.
Cox was officially charged in the murder in June 2019 but, at the time, had already been incarcerated since 2003, the year he was convicted of being an administrator for an international online child pornography network. He completed his sentence for that crime in 2011 but continued to stay behind bars after authorities designated him as a "sexually dangerous person" under the Adam Walsh Act and said he would continue to commit sexual attacks on children if he is released.
That successful argument stemmed from the 63-year-old's lengthy history of crimes against children, a record of which was obtained by KMOV. Having joined the Air Force in 1975, Cox was dishonorably discharged in 1982 after he was convicted of sexual offenses against four young girls he had been babysitting while stationed in Frankfurt, Germany.
He was released on federal parole three years into an eight-year sentence but was arrested again in 1989 as a suspect in the molestation of a seven-year-old girl at a park behind Angie’s elementary school. His federal parole was revoked and he returned to prison. He was released again just 11 months before Angie disappeared and had been living just a few blocks away from the nine-year-old at the time she went missing.
During an emotionally-charged hearing this past week that saw Angie's stepfather, brother, aunts, and cousin addressing the court about the pain Angie's death inflicted on the family, Cox pleaded guilty to charges of first-degree murder and first-degree sexual abuse in exchange for prosecutors not asking for the death penalty. He admitted to picking up the girl on a frigid afternoon, driving her off against her will, taking her to Wentzville, where he was renting a home, and sexually abusing her repeatedly while holding her captive before abandoning her in the Busch Wildlife Area.
St Charles County Circuit Judge Jon A Cunningham ultimately sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, something that Angie's aunt Sandra Hill said she had been dissatisfied with. "I was hoping for the death penalty but as long as he spends the rest of his life in jail and not hurting another child that's the most important," she said, according to KMOV. "I don't want another family to go through what we had to go through."
St Charles County Prosecuting Attorney Tim Lohmar seconded that notion. "Today culminates 27 years of anguish, pain, and hard work from countless numbers of other people. I’m proud today that we were able to, collectively, as a team to close this matter, give the victim’s family some sense of closure and justice," he said.
"He deserves a worse fate than what he gave Angie. The community deserved to know what happened from the mouth of the man who did it and that was the only way we were going to [get that] was to accept his plea and recommend life in prison without parole."