Michael Webb, convicted of kidnapping Fort Worth girl, may face life in prison
Michael Webb needed a pad and a pen when police asked him to describe what he had done. He refused to say it. Even on paper, the account was supplemented with a lie.
Knowing that a nurse was about to describe in court her 8-year-old-daughter’s injuries and sexual assault, the girl’s mother could not listen. She left the courtroom and waited in the hall.
So much is horrific in what unfolded during the eight hours in May that passed between when Webb ripped the little girl from her mother’s hands as they walked in Ryan Place and when she was rescued from a third-floor hotel room early the next day.
On Wednesday, a U.S. District Court jury deliberated for about 10 minutes before it found Webb guilty of kidnapping.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor will sentence Webb, who is 51 and was homeless when he was arrested.
Erin Nealy Cox, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said outside the courthouse that her office would seek life in prison, the maximum penalty. Webb faces a minimum of 20 years. A sentencing date has not been scheduled.
Webb was not in the courtroom for the verdict. Indeed, he was not present for any part of his trial. Before jury selection Tuesday, Webb waived his right to be there. Webb told O’Connor he had trial strategy disagreements with his attorneys.
Many relatives of the victim were there. After they testified, some witnesses moved to the gallery to listen to others do the same. Fort Worth Police Officers Dutch Rovell and Tiffany Hayes, who comforted the girl in the minutes after she was found, were among them.
Interim Fort Worth Police Chief Ed Kraus was briefly in the gallery before the trial got underway as Webb discussed his unhappiness.
Cox and Assistant U.S. Attorney Aisha Saleem prosecuted the case.
“Today’s verdict is about closure and consequence. Closure for this family, waiting for this day. And consequence for the defendant,” Cox said outside the courthouse. “We’re very happy with the verdict. We felt like the evidence against the defendant was overwhelming.”
Webb has been indicted in state court on crimes connected to the abduction. After the verdict, a spokeswoman for the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office said its case remains pending.
Webb’s attorneys, Federal Public Defenders John Stickney and Brook Antonio, did not cross-examine the government’s witnesses and did not present evidence. In his closing argument, Stickney urged jurors to set aside emotions stirred by testimony on the sexual assault and focus on what he described as the absence of evidence that Webb participated in interstate commerce during the crime. That is one of the elements the federal kidnapping statute requires.
Stickney told the jury that prosecutors had not proved that the WoodSpring Suites hotel in Forest Hill was involved in that sort of business activity or that Webb had used the internet on his cellphone to get directions to the hotel, as he said in a police interview.
The victim was walking with her mother on May 18 when Webb pulled her into a Ford Five Hundred registered to his mother.
The pair had first encountered Webb while he was driving the sedan. The mother rebuffed him when he asked if she wanted to get high and later, if she liked money, she testified as the trial’s first witness.
He would return. This time, Webb left his car, grabbed the girl and pushed her through the driver’s door into the passenger seat.
Her mother also got inside the car and sat on Webb’s lap, searching for the brakes and considering whether she should steer the car into another. The abductor eventually slammed on the brakes and forced her outside.
FBI Special Agent Chris Thompson, his agency’s lead investigator, was the trial’s final witness. He described video segments of an interview of Webb he conducted with Fort Worth Police Detective Amy Heise.
Webb listened to Miranda warnings and said he would answer the law enforcement officers’ questions, Thompson testified.
Early on, Heise asked Webb if he knew why he was there.
“A little girl,” he said. “That little girl.”
For two hours, Webb insisted a man named Nick promised him a $1,000 payment to kidnap the girl. Investigators said that wasn’t true.
The jury watched on video screens as Webb confessed in the interview.
Webb abducted the girl at about 6:30 p.m and arrived at the hotel at 8:30 p.m. He said the two hours in between were spent in the car in an empty parking lot.
Speaking softly and at times crying, Webb admitted that he told the 8-year-old girl he would have her parents harmed by his friends if he was imprisoned, if she told someone what he did to her.
About six hours after the victim was abducted, a Forest Hill police sergeant searched the bathroom, under the bed and in the refrigerator in Webb’s room. He left when he did not find the girl.
When it came to hiding the girl in the hotel room, Webb said he recalled his grandmother’s advice on concealment: In plain sight.
He directed the girl to get in a storage container and covered her with his dirty clothes.
On a second trip to the hotel, law enforcement officers again knocked on Webb’s door and twice used a ram before Webb opened it.
This story was originally published September 25, 2019 at 12:09 PM.
