Missouri’s Most SHOCKING Murder. TWO Men Confessed, ONE Arrested

Missouri’s Most SHOCKING Murder. TWO Men Confessed, ONE Arrested

The morning of November 3rd, 2007, Colleen Munson walked through her front door after a long overnight shift at Walmart. She was exhausted, but there was one thing that always made the walk home worth it. Rowan always ran to the door. Every single time, without fail, that little girl would hear the handle turn and come sprinting down the hallway, full speed, arms out, like Colleen had been gone for years instead of hours.

 But that morning, the hallway was empty. The house was completely silent. Stella, Missouri has fewer than 150 people. In a town that’s small, there are no strangers. There are no secrets. A bicycle doesn’t go missing without the whole street noticing. A child doesn’t disappear without someone seeing something. That is what makes what happened next so impossible to understand.

 Rowan Damia Ford was 9 years old, fourth grade at Triway Elementary. Her bedroom was painted Barbie pink. Her prized possession was a blue-tinted bicycle she had just learned to ride that summer. On Sunday mornings, she would arrive at Stella Baptist Church before the pastor. Not because anyone told her to, but because she wanted to make sure she was there in case someone needed help.

 That was the kind of girl she was. Her teachers ran out of words trying to describe her. One simply said, “She was everybody’s friend.” Another called her “a little ray of sunshine.” And they meant it, not as a polite thing people say about children, but as a specific, daily, observable truth. There were also things about Rowan’s life that didn’t make the news.

 Some mornings she came to school without socks in the middle of a Missouri winter. Her hair was sometimes matted and unwashed. Teachers noticed. On the very last morning anyone at school ever saw her, a teacher named Tammy spent 30 minutes brushing her hair and pulling it into a neat ponytail before class started. Later that afternoon, Tammy spotted Rowan skipping alone down the hallway.

“She looked so happy,” Tammy would later say, “like everything was great with her.” Tammy didn’t know it then, but that was the last act of care anyone would ever give that little girl while she was still alive. Colleen searched every room, then the yard, then the street. She came back inside and woke David up.

 David Spears was Rowan’s stepfather, 25 years old. He was asleep on the couch. “Where is Rowan?” David barely opened his eyes. He said she went to a friend’s house. He didn’t know which friend. Something shifted inside Colleen right then. Not panic, not yet. But a cold, quiet feeling that a mother gets when an answer doesn’t add up.

 She started calling every family she knew, every house Rowan had ever visited, and every single time the answer was the same. “No, we haven’t seen her.” She told David they needed to call the police. David said no. He said Rowan would come home. He said Colleen was overreacting, and there was something deeply revealing about that moment because David was the last person to have seen Rowan.

 He had been in the house with her, and his response to his wife’s fear was not alarm. It was not urgency. It was patience. A strange, deliberate patience that made no sense for a man whose 9-year-old stepdaughter was unaccounted for. So, Colleen waited because David told her to wait. An hour passed, then two, then the afternoon came and went.

 And with every hour of silence, the cold feeling inside her turned into something she could no longer push down. By 6:50 that evening, nearly 10 hours after she first came home, Colleen called 911 herself. Within the hour, an Amber Alert went out. And within that same hour, almost everyone in Stella was outside. That is what 150 people look like when a child goes missing from their town.

 Flashlights moving through fields, voices calling her name into the dark. Strangers searching alongside neighbors, all of them holding onto the same desperate hope. Newton County Sheriff Chris Jennings arrived at the house and started asking questions. And the very first thing that didn’t sit right was David. His story kept shifting.

 He said Rowan was asleep when he left the house. Then he said maybe she’d asked to go to a friend’s place. Then, only after investigators pushed, he admitted he had gone out a second time that night at 1:30 in the morning. He called his mother, borrowed her car, and was gone for 5 and 1/2 hours with no clear explanation of where he had been or why he didn’t report her missing until 8 or 10 hours after she was gone, Jennings would later say.

 We caught him in several lies. Oh, his story changed multiple times. But David was not alone the night before. He had been with two other men, a mutual friend named Nathan Maharren and a man named Christopher Collings, someone who had lived inside this very house just weeks earlier, someone Rowan had trusted so completely she had given him a name that only the people closest to her ever received.

They called him Uncle Chris. Three men had been together the night Rowan disappeared. A town of 150 people had no leads and somewhere beyond the reach of every flashlight and every search team, a 9-year-old girl was already gone. To understand what happened to Rowan Ford, you have to go back to the night before she disappeared, November 2nd, 2007.

 A small house in Stella, three men drinking, shooting pool, laughing while a 9-year-old girl slept on the floor of her bedroom down the hall. David Spears and Christopher Collings had been friends for nearly a decade. Same area, same farm work, same circle. And earlier that year, when Christopher needed a place to stay, David opened his door without hesitation.

 For months, Christopher lived in the basement of that house. He ate their food. He sat at their table. He helped Rowan with her schoolwork after dinner. She called him Uncle Chris. By late October, Christopher had moved to a travel trailer on his family’s farm in Wheaton, about 10 minutes east of Stella along State Highway A, different town, different county, but the same people, the same trust.

 That Friday evening, the three men, Christopher, David, and their mutual friend Nathan Maharren, met after work, bought alcohol, and headed to David’s house at 8:30 p.m. Colleen left for her shift. Rowan was asleep. The men kept drinking, bought more, and eventually all three drove out to Christopher’s trailer in Wheaton to keep the night going.

 Picture where that trailer sat. Not on a main road, not near neighbors. A farm property outside a small town surrounded by fields and tree lines, swallowed by Missouri darkness. No one out there, no one watching, no one counting the hours, no one thinking about a little girl sleeping alone 15 minutes away. When Nathan finally decided to call it a night, he took the back roads home, deliberately avoiding State Highway A because he was too drunk to risk a police stop. The long way, the slow way.

He dropped David off and was home by midnight. The next morning, Rowan was gone. By November 4th, investigators had spoken to Nathan. His story was clean. His timeline held up. Then they found Christopher Collings in the parking lot of a local restaurant, and Christopher was helpful. He gave the same basic account as Nathan.

 The drinking, the pool, the trailer. He said he had stayed in and gone to sleep after the others left. He said he had no contact with David after that night. He said he only found out Rowan was missing when police told him. Cooperative, concerned, polite. Those were the exact words deputies used to describe him. That same evening, Christopher drove to Colleen’s house, knocked on the door, asked how the search was going, offered his help.

When the FBI stepped in on November 5th, Christopher stepped forward to meet them. He came to the sheriff’s office without being asked. He agreed to a polygraph. He agreed to a computer voice stress analysis. He sat across from federal investigators and pointed his finger directly at David Spears. Said David’s alibi wasn’t truthful.

 Said he believed David was involved in whatever happened to Rowan. And then he went one step further. He offered to wear a wire. He didn’t just offer to help. He volunteered to become the hunter, to walk back into David’s life wired up and extract a confession. He was positioning himself as the loyal friend willing to sacrifice that friendship for justice.

But think about what that really means. An innocent man searches. An innocent man answers questions. An innocent man does not architect the investigation around himself. He does not redirect. He does not perform. Christopher wasn’t just cooperating, he was controlling, steering, managing every interaction to make sure the spotlight stayed pointed somewhere else.

 He was building a stage and he was the only one who knew the show was fake. Chief Clinton Clark felt it first. Clark had known Christopher since he was a young boy, 17 years. He had been close with Christopher’s adoptive parents, had watched him grow up, had been the person Christopher called when his mother died. There was a genuine bond there, real history, real trust.

 So, when Christopher flagged Clark down during a routine patrol on November 5th, Clark stopped and listened. Christopher talked about the search, said he was helping wherever he could, but something was wrong. Clark would later say Christopher was not his normal self, jittery, unsettled. And when Clark looked at him directly, Christopher looked away.

 In 17 years, Christopher had never had trouble holding Clark’s gaze. Clark contacted the FBI that same afternoon. He told them what he had seen and what the FBI told him next would define the rest of the investigation. They believed that if Christopher Collings was ever going to break, it would not be in an interrogation room.

 It would not be under bright lights with federal agents across the table. It would be with Clark, only Clark, because Christopher didn’t fear Clark, he trusted him. And the FBI understood something that Christopher hadn’t figured out yet, that the man he trusted most was now the man working hardest to uncover what he had done. Clark kept meeting with him.

 And every time they spoke, Clark watched the boy he had known for 17 years slowly disappear, replaced by someone he no longer recognized, a man carrying something so heavy it was starting to show in his eyes. For six days the search found nothing. Rowan’s name was everywhere. Her face on every screen. Her community out every morning searching every evening.

 And Christopher Collings was right there with them, visible, present, sympathetic. On November 8th, a Newton County death investigator named Mark Bridges, who had employed both David and Christopher, spent the day with David under FBI supervision. He tried something simple. He asked David to think like Christopher.

 “If you were Chris,” he said, “where would you take her?” David paused. Then he said, “Let’s go look at some places.” The first place David led him to was a sinkhole in the woods of McDonald County, a place called Fox Cave. Before we go any further, drop a comment and tell us where in the world you’re watching this from.

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 They drove south into McDonald County, the kind of Missouri terrain that swallows everything. Narrow roads, dense tree lines pressing in from both sides, no buildings, no people. The kind of land where the ground keeps secrets because nobody has any reason to go looking. David led Mark off the road and stopped near a heavily wooded area.

There was no trail, no marker, just trees. And beyond them, a hole in the earth. Fox Cave wasn’t a cave in any traditional sense. No entrance, no tunnel, just a sinkhole open at the top, dropping straight down into cold Missouri darkness. Wide enough that branches thrown over it would simply fall inside.

 Mark stood at the edge and felt everything shift. He saw items near the opening he couldn’t immediately identify. Something about this place, the specific way David had led him here, the silence, the deliberate path through the trees, told him they were standing at the end of a very long search. Subconsciously, Mark would later say, “I think David wanted to be found out.

” Mark contacted McDonald County Sheriff’s Department immediately. At 8:00 a.m. on the morning of November 9th, Deputies Mike Hall and Jake Boles arrived at Fox Cave with flashlights. They looked over the edge. 20 ft below the surface, on a narrow rock ledge inside that sinkhole, was a child’s body.

 Rowan was covered in leaves and debris. She was found in a state of undress, which was a deeply distressing detail for the investigators. There was a ligature mark around her neck. Her body showed signs of significant physical trauma. Due to the nature of the terrain, her body had been there for 6 days. 6 days while her mother sat on porch steps waiting for any news.

 6 days while her community searched fields and called her name into the dark. 6 days while the man who put her there kept showing up to ask how the search was going. The autopsy confirmed she had been assaulted before she was killed. Cause of death, ligature strangulation. She had been conscious for approximately 10 seconds after the rope tightened. Gone within minutes.

 She was 9 years old. Chief Clark heard the news on the radio that morning. Before he could process it, his office called. Christopher Collings had already come by asking for him. Wanted to know what time Clark came on duty. Said it was urgent. The FBI reached Clark immediately. Find him. Tell him they found Rowan.

 Watch what happens next. But Christopher was already gone. Clark drove through Wheaton looking for him. Nothing. Then his phone rang. It was Christopher. And the first words out of his mouth were not about Rowan. They were, “Are you following me in a gray minivan?” He had been driving in circles for hours, convinced he was being watched.

 Trying to shake surveillance that may or may not have existed. This was not grief. This was not shock. This was a man who had spent 7 days managing a performance. And now that the body had been found, the performance was collapsing from the inside. Clark told him to come to the station. Christopher refused.

 He would only meet in person, privately. When they finally met, Clark got him into the patrol car, and as they drove, he delivered the words the FBI had asked him to say. “Son, it’s over. We found Rowan’s body this morning.” Christopher’s head dropped. His eyes filled with water. Clark still believed David had done this. He assumed Christopher was a man who had been protecting his friend, carrying someone else’s secret, so he pressed gently.

“Tell me what David did. Tell me what you saw.” Christopher looked at him with an expression Clark had never seen on his face before. Not guilt, not relief, something heavier than both. The face of a man who had been carrying something for 7 days and had finally run out of road.

 They drove to Mooney Bridge, a few miles outside Wheaton, quiet and isolated. When they stopped and stepped out, Christopher extended both hands toward Clark, wrists together, waiting. Clark told him that wasn’t necessary. Christopher looked at him and said, “For what I’m about to tell you, you will.” They sat on the slope near the bridge, and Christopher began to speak.

 Clark wasn’t just listening to a confession. He was watching the boy he had mentored for 17 years disappear in real time, replaced, word by word, by someone he had never known at all. Christopher confirmed that Nathan had taken the back roads that night. And then he said something that reframed every single moment of the past 7 days.

 He said he knew, the moment Nathan chose the long way home, that he had time, time to get back to Stella before either of them did, time to get to Rowan. Every offer to help, every suggestion of where to search, every finger pointed at David, every wire, every conversation with Clark, all of it had been architecture, a 7-day structure built by a man who already knew the answer to the question everyone was asking.

 And now, sitting on a slope above the same river he had once planned to use, Christopher Collings began to describe exactly what he had done. He knew the moment Nathan chose the back roads. That was the calculation. Nathan was drunk and scared of a DUI stop, so he took the long way home to the back roads. That route added time.

 Enough time for someone who took State Highway A, the faster direct route, to get back to Stella first. Christopher took State Highway A. He drove fast. He got to the house before Nathan and David made it back. He went inside, used the bathroom, and then walked down the hall to Rowan’s bedroom. She was asleep on the floor. He picked her up without making a sound, carried her outside, put her in his truck.

 She didn’t wake up. Not during the lift. Not during the drive. Not until he was already back at the trailer in Wheaton, and by then it was too late. Christopher kept the lights off inside the trailer. He didn’t speak, not a single word, because he didn’t want her to recognize his voice. He was deliberate, calculated.

 This was not a man who lost control in a moment of impulse. This was a man who had thought about the timing, the route, the silence, the darkness. When Rowan woke, she struggled, but Christopher was 6 ft 8 in tall and weighed over 280 lb. She was 9 years old. She never had a chance. Afterward, Christopher said he intended to take her home.

 He carried her outside, holding her arms from behind, keeping her facing away from him so she couldn’t see his face. He had kept the lights off. He had stayed silent. He had been so careful about every detail. But he had not accounted for the moon. It was a clear November night, and when Rowan turned her head and looked back over her shoulder, the moonlight did what Christopher’s careful planning could not prevent. She saw his face.

 She recognized him. The man who had lived in her house. The man who helped her with homework. The man she had called Uncle Chris since she was old enough to trust someone. Christopher told Chief Clark that he freaked out. That a single word, the word investigators would use in every court document for years afterward.

 He reached into the bed of an old pickup truck sitting on the property and found a coil of rope. He described a violent act detailing how he used a rope to end her life from behind. Rowan struggled. He kept the rope tight. She stopped struggling. She fell. And he kept it tight even after she stopped moving. Even after she fell to the ground.

 Even after the night went completely silent again. He put her body in the bed of his truck. He considered the Money Bridge, the same bridge where he now sat confessing, but decided her body would be found too quickly there. So he drove, thinking, calculating. He remembered Fox Cave. He drove to McDonald County, carried her to the sinkhole and dropped her in.

 He tried to pull branches over the opening, but it was too wide. Everything fell inside with her. He drove home. At the trailer, he found blood on his mattress and his clothing. He put Rowan’s pajama pants, her underwear, and the rope into the wood stove and burned them. He rolled up the mattress and stuffed it into a 55-gallon drum. Then he stopped.

 A fire that large would be visible. Someone would see the smoke. So he dragged the drum into the barn, closed the doors, and set it on fire inside. Then he went to bed. And the next morning, when the search began, Christopher Collings was one of the first people to show up and help. Chief Clark sat on that slope and listened to all of it.

Then he drove Christopher back to the police station, where Christopher repeated the entire confession to deputies from Barry County, Newton County, and the FBI. Every detail. Every step. The same story told the same way without contradiction. He was then transferred to Barry County Sheriff’s Department for a recorded videotape statement.

 He said he had been crying all afternoon. He said he felt remorse. The investigators were stunned. Not because of the confession, but because for 7 days, every single one of them had been certain that David Spears was the killer. They had built their entire theory around David. Christopher, in their minds, had been a witness at most.

They were wrong about everything. So, they brought David back in. And David, now knowing Christopher had confessed, broke completely. He told investigators a story that stopped everyone in the room. He said that when he got home that night, he checked Rowan’s room and found her gone.

 He said he knew immediately that Christopher had taken her. So, he called his mother, borrowed her car, and drove to Christopher’s trailer. And when he got there, he said he saw what was happening. And instead of stopping it, he joined in. David said Christopher then handed him the rope. And David said he was the one who strangled Rowan.

 “I choked her with it,” David told investigators. “I realized she’s gone. She’s She’s really gone.” He said his mind had simply shut off, that his memories of that night had only started coming back to him in pieces. Two men, two confessions. Both admitting to the same crime, both placing themselves at the same location, but their versions were irreconcilable.

 Christopher insisted David was never there, never involved, not for a single moment. And forensic investigators had found physical evidence placing Christopher at the scene, but nothing, not a hair, not a fiber, not a single trace definitively placing David. And then there were the cadaver dogs. Three separate cadaver dogs had all hit on Myrna Spears’s car, the car David had borrowed that night for 5 and 1/2 hours, which meant at some point Rowan’s body had been inside that vehicle.

 But whose hands had put it there? Two confessions pointing in opposite directions. One man whose physical evidence was everywhere. One man whose car the dogs had marked. One little girl at the bottom of the sinkhole. And a question that forensic science, two trials, and 17 years still cannot answer with complete certainty. On March 12th, 2012, 4 years, 4 months, and 9 days after Rowan Ford disappeared from her bedroom, Christopher Leroy Collings stood trial in Phelps County, Missouri.

 The jury was brought in from Platte County. The trial lasted 1 week. Forensic evidence was presented. The videotaped confession was played in full. Rowan’s mother Colleen took the stand. Her teachers took the stand. The people who had loved that little girl sat in that courtroom and described what her absence had done to them.

 Not in the abstract, but in the specific daily unbearable ways that grief actually works. On March 20th, the jury returned a guilty verdict for first-degree murder. Three days later after the penalty phase, they came back with their sentence recommendation. They had deliberated for 48 minutes. The jury found that Rowan’s death involved torture, that it was outrageously and wantonly vile, horrible, and inhumane.

That Christopher had killed her specifically to prevent her from identifying him. 48 minutes to decide the rest of his life. Christopher Collings was sentenced to death. Then came the question everyone had been waiting for. What about David Spears? On September 26, 2012, 6 months after Christopher’s conviction, Barry County Prosecuting Attorney Johnny Cox stood before the court and announced that the first-degree murder and rape charges against David Spears were being dropped.

The courtroom went silent. Cox explained his reasoning carefully. Over nearly 5 years, investigators had pursued every piece of physical evidence they could find. The rape kit, the forensic analysis, the FBI lab, an independent laboratory, none of it placed David at the scene of the crime. None of it corroborated his confession.

Every piece of physical evidence pointed to Christopher and Christopher alone. And there was a deeper legal problem. Christopher had confessed and said David was never there. David had confessed and said he was. Two confessions, completely opposite. If the state prosecuted David using his own confession, they would have to argue that both versions were simultaneously true, and that argument could have unraveled Christopher’s conviction entirely.

A convicted murderer walks free because the prosecution overreached. Cox would not take that risk. “I cannot, in good conscience,” he said, “ask a jury to convict a person of murder in the first degree and ask that he be put to death if I am uncertain about his involvement.” David Spears pleaded guilty to child endangerment and hindering prosecution.

 He was sentenced to 11 years, the maximum for both charges combined. With time already served, he was released from prison in March 2015. He was 32 years old. What happened next is perhaps the detail that lands hardest of all. Shortly after his release, while still on probation, David Spears was hired by the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office, the same office that had represented both him and Christopher Collings.

 He was hired by the husband of his own trial attorney. He worked there for 1 year and 8 months. When a reporter contacted him at that office in December 2024, David Spears said, “Ma’am, you called me at work. I have no comment. Please don’t call my place of work again.” As of early 2025, David Spears continues to work for the state’s public defender office.

 The appeals took years. Christopher challenged his conviction on multiple grounds: the Chief Clark friendship, the withheld information about Clark’s military record, the conflict of interest created by David working at the public defender’s office. Every court reviewed every argument. Every appeal was denied.

 The Missouri Supreme Court, the US District Court, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, the United States Supreme Court, one by one the doors closed on August 13th, 2024, the Missouri Supreme Court set the execution date, December 3rd, 2024. Rowan’s sister, Aryon Max, was 18 years old when her little sister was killed. She is 35 now.

 She spoke to reporters in the days before the execution from her home in Alabama. “I am so proud of the girl she was turning out to be,” she said. “A part of me died when my sister died. I did lose my ray of sunshine.” She said, “Christopher deserved to die, but lethal injection felt too easy. I cannot even imagine the pain when Rowan was strangled.

 Chris being so tall and so big compared to my little sister, she didn’t have a fighting chance. Rowan’s mother and one of her brothers attended the execution as witnesses. Ariane could not make the trip. Newton County Sheriff Chris Jennings, the man who had taken the missing person’s call 17 years earlier, submitted a request to attend the execution himself.

 He had carried something in his pocket since November 2007. Something he never put away, never left at the office, never locked in a drawer. Rowan’s school ID. I’ve worked hundreds of homicides in my career, he said. This is the one that will always stay with me. On December 3rd, 2024 at the Eastern Reception Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bon Terre, Missouri, Christopher Leroy Callings ate his final meal.

 A bacon cheeseburger, breaded mushrooms, tater tots, and a chef salad. At 6:00 p.m., the execution witnesses were moved into place. Colleen and one of Rowan’s brothers sat behind the glass. Four members of his legal team, four members of the media, his spiritual advisor stood at his side. At 6:10 p.m., the sentence of the court was carried out and Christopher Callings was pronounced dead.

 He had lived 17 years longer than Rowan Ford. His written final statement was read aloud afterward. Right or wrong, I accept this situation for what it is. To anyone that I have hurt in this life, I am sorry. I hope you’re able to get closure and move on. I hope to see you in heaven one day. But closure is a complicated thing. Because somewhere in Missouri, the man who borrowed his mother’s car at 1:30 in the morning and was gone for 5 and 1/2 hours, the man whose story changed four times, the man three cadaver dogs pointed to, the man who confessed and

then watched the charges disappear, is still alive. Still working. Still walking through a door every morning. And a little girl who used to run to greet her mother at that door is not. Rowan Damia Ford never made it to 10 years old. She never got to ride that blue bicycle into a summer she was old enough to remember.

 Her Barbie pink bedroom sat empty. Her purple thing stayed purple, and her school ID carried in the pocket of a sheriff who never forgot her is the closest thing to justice that looks and feels like what the word is supposed to mean. The questions this case leaves behind are not small ones. Did David Spears know, truly know, what Christopher had done that night? If those cadaver dogs were right, what does that mean for everything the prosecution decided not to pursue? And what does it say about a justice system when two men

confessed to the same murder, the evidence only condemns one of them, and the other one answers phones at a public defender’s office? Rowena deserved better than partial. She deserved all of it. What do you think? Was the decision to drop charges against David Spears the right call, or did the justice system fail Rowena a second time? If Christopher truly acted alone, why did three separate cadaver dogs hit on David’s mother’s car? And 17 years later, with one man executed and one man free, do you believe justice was actually served?