Stranger who kidnapped 8-year-old as she walked with her mom sentenced in Fort Worth
A police officer was outside his hotel room door, and Michael Webb had a child he needed to conceal.
He settled on a laundry basket and told the 8-year-old girl that he would kill her parents if she moved or spoke.
The little girl, whom Webb had abducted five and a half hours earlier as she walked with her mother in Fort Worth, was left to decide whether to protect herself or protect her parents. She did as she was told.
Webb covered her with his dirty clothes, and the ruse worked. The officer left after looking under the bed and behind a shower curtain and finding nothing amiss.
Webb, who carried out the abduction in order to sexually assault the girl, deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison because of the terror he stirred, prosecutors argued Thursday. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor agreed and sentenced Webb to the maximum life term for his kidnapping conviction. It was a just punishment, he said.
The victim’s father told the judge Webb “should be swept from this earth.”
“The defendant stole this child’s innocence,” Erin Nealy Cox, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said during the sentencing hearing.
“She knows that there is evil in this world. Evil has a face, and that face is Michael Webb’s.”
The girl’s mother, sitting in the court gallery’s front row, wiped tears from her eyes. Her former husband, the child’s father, rubbed her back.
Fort Worth Police Officer Dutch Rovell, who carried the girl from the room to a patrol car after she was found, looked toward the ceiling and exhaled.
Before he announced the sentence, O’Connor asked Webb if he had anything to say. After whispering with his attorney, Webb declined to speak.
Webb had planned to be absent from the courtroom in downtown Fort Worth as the judge meted his punishment.
But O’Connor, acting on a request from prosecutors, directed the U.S. Marshals Service to be certain Webb was present for the hearing.
A jury deliberated for about 10 minutes on Sept. 25 before it found Webb guilty of kidnapping.
Webb, who is 51, faced a minimum of 20 years in prison, the term his attorney sought. Federal Public Defender John Stickney noted that Webb has been indicted in state court on crimes related to the abduction. After Webb was sentenced, a spokeswoman for the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office declined to comment on its plans regarding prosecution on the state charges.
Chief among the several reasons the case was unusual is that Webb and the girl were strangers.
“He saw her on the street and just decided to take her,” Nealy Cox said.
He violently forced the girl from her mother’s side as they walked in the Ryan Place neighborhood.
Law enforcement officers and distressed civilians scanned the city for the kidnapper’s car for eight hours on a Saturday evening in May. The search ended when she was rescued from a third-floor hotel room early the next day.
An image of Webb’s car was recorded as it left the scene by a camera outside a house nearby. Two people who were familiar with the girl’s father spotted the car as they drove around to help find her after seeing an image of the car online.
Nealy Cox prosecuted the case with Assistant U.S. Attorney Aisha Saleem. It is unusual for the top federal law enforcement officer in any federal district to personally handle a case.
Webb was not in the courtroom during the core of his trial in late September. Before jury selection, Webb waived his right to be there. He was vexed with O’Connor’s prior ruling allowing video of Webb’s interview with police to be shown to the jury and disagreed with his attorneys on other matters.
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.
Webb left his car, grabbed the girl and pushed her through the driver’s door into the passenger seat.
FBI Special Agent Chris Thompson was the trial’s final witness. He described video segments of an interview of Webb that he conducted with Fort Worth Police Detective Amy Heise.
Inside an interview room on Calvert Street just northwest of downtown, Webb confessed.
For two hours, Webb insisted a man named Nick promised him a $1,000 payment to kidnap the girl. Later, the suspect said that account was not true.
“What did you say to scare her, Michael?” Heise asked.
“I told her if she said anything, that I would do something to her parents, and if I was in jail, I would have my friends do it,” Webb said as he cried.
Webb indicated that he scanned the area for witnesses before grabbing the girl.
“I scoped it out pretty good and, and I know I missed somebody, because when I pushed the woman and grabbed her, I heard somebody screaming,” he said.
Webb abducted the girl at about 6:30 p.m and arrived at the Forest Hill hotel at 8:30 p.m. He said the two hours in between were spent in the car in an empty parking lot.
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.
On a second trip to the hotel, Fort Worth police officers knocked on Webb’s door and twice used a ram before Webb opened it.
This story was originally published November 14, 2019 at 11:31 AM.
