JUST IN : Christopher Collings Executed for Killing 9-Year-Old Rowan Ford | Missouri Death Row Case.

JUST IN : Christopher Collings Executed for Killing 9-Year-Old Rowan Ford | Missouri Death Row Case.

December 3rd, 2024. Bonne Terre, Missouri. It is just past 6:00 in the evening, and the sky outside the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center has already gone dark. Winter dark. The kind that comes early in Missouri and sits heavy on everything it touches. Inside the prison, the hallways are quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of a building winding down for the night, but something different. The kind of quiet that tells you something final is about to happen.

A man named Christopher Leroy Collings is being walked to the execution chamber. He is 49 years old. He stands 6’8″ tall. He has spent the last 12 years on death row in the state of Missouri, and tonight—this night, this specific December Tuesday—every road out has closed. The governor said no on Monday. The Supreme Court of the United States said no. His attorneys have filed everything there is to file. There is nothing left to argue, no court left to call.

Inside the witness gallery, a woman named Colleen Munson takes her seat. She is quiet. She has been waiting for this night for 17 years. She does not look away. And somewhere in that heavy December silence, in the space between what the law calls justice and the questions this case has never fully answered, a name is about to be spoken again: Rowan Ford.

Before we watch Christopher Collings take his last breath, we need to understand what happened inside a small house in Stella, Missouri, in the early hours of November 3rd, 2007. We need to understand who Rowan was, who Collings was, what David Spears knew, and why 17 years later there are still people who believe the full truth of that night was never told in a courtroom. To know why the state had to kill the condemned, we have to go back.

Stella, Missouri, is not the kind of town that shows up in the news. It sits in Newton County in the southwestern corner of the state, tucked between farmland, gravel roads, and the kind of wide-open sky that makes you feel like the rest of the world is very far away. Population: a few hundred people, maybe less depending on the year. Neighbors know each other’s business. Everybody recognizes everybody’s truck. It is the kind of place where people feel safe, where a parent leaves for a night shift and doesn’t think twice about what might come through the door while they are gone.

Rowan Damia Ford grew up in Stella. She was born on April 11th, 1998, in San Diego, California, but Missouri was home. She was a fourth-grader at Triway Elementary School—a hardworking, happy student, her teachers would later say under oath, their voices tight with the effort of talking about her in the past tense. She loved going to church so much that sometimes she went alone, without being asked, without being reminded. She was, in the truest sense, just a little girl: bright, ordinary, and full of the kind of life that doesn’t know yet how fragile it is.

She lived in a two-story home in Stella with her mother, Colleen Munson, and her stepfather, David Spears. Colleen worked an overnight shift, long hours, gone by evening, home in the morning, and the household ran on the rhythm of that schedule. Spears had known a man named Christopher Collings for close to 10 years. They were friends—the kind of friends who work together, drink together, and look out for each other. During the summer and fall of 2007, Collings had moved into the Spears household, sleeping in the basement while he got himself back on his feet.

To Rowan, Christopher Collings was not a stranger. He was a regular presence in her home. He helped her with her homework. He was around at dinner, around on weekends, around on ordinary afternoons when Rowan came home from school and dropped her backpack by the door. She called him “Uncle Chris.” She said it naturally, easily, the way children do when an adult becomes part of the furniture of their world. She trusted him the way children trust the adults who are always there.

In late October 2007, Collings moved out. He relocated to his family’s farm in Wheaton, a small community in Barry County, just over the county line from Newton County—roughly a 15-to-20-minute drive from the Spears home. He set up in a travel trailer on the property, about a mile east of Wheaton. He made his living doing odd jobs, construction work, and selling scrap metal. He and Spears stayed in contact. The friendship continued. They still worked the same job sometimes, still got together on weekends, still drank. That friendship and the comfortable trust it had built inside the Spears household was about to become the most dangerous thing in Rowan Ford’s world.

Friday, November 2nd, 2007. The day starts like any other day in Stella. Rowan goes to school, Colleen prepares for her overnight shift, and Spears is around. By the evening, things are moving the way they normally move until Nathan Mahurin, a mutual friend of Collings and Spears, meets up with the two men at a farm where they have been working that day. Mahurin is the third man—not the main character of this story, but he will matter because he is the one driving that night. And the route he chooses on the way home is going to open a window that Christopher Collings will crawl through.

All three men finish their work shift and make their first stop: a liquor store, where they pick up two or three six-packs of Smirnoff Ice malt liquor. Then they drive to Spears’ home in Stella to drink and play pool. The pool table is in the house. The beer is cold. The evening feels like any other Friday evening between three men who have done this dozens of times before.

At 8:30 p.m., Colleen Munson laces up her shoes and gets ready to leave for work. Before she walks out the door, Rowan, who has been awake, runs downstairs to say goodbye. She gives her mother a hug. She gives her a kiss. Colleen walks out into the November night. That is the last time she will ever see her daughter alive.

The three men keep drinking. They are not done. They make more trips—at least three more runs for alcohol over the course of the evening. By the time the night is deep, they have left Spears’ home and driven to Collings’ trailer in Wheaton, where they smoke marijuana. Collings, by his own later admission, drank five six-packs of Smirnoff Ice that night. Five. He would say in his confession that he was really, really messed up.

Rowan Ford is back at the house in Stella. She has fallen asleep on the bedroom floor. She is alone in the house. Three grown men left her there, and she is alone. Around 10:45 p.m., the men decide to call it a night. Collings wants to go home. Mahurin offers to drive. They convince Spears to come along for the ride. They pile into Mahurin’s vehicle and leave Wheaton, heading back toward Stella. But on the way, they stop again—one more beer run. Mahurin and Spears pick up more alcohol while Collings waits.

Now they are heading back toward the Spears house to drop David off, and Mahurin, intoxicated and cautious—not willing to risk getting pulled over on the main roads—takes the back way, the long way, the slow road through the dark. It is significantly longer than the direct route. Around 11:30 p.m., Mahurin and Spears leave Collings at his trailer and begin the drive back. Mahurin threads his way through the back roads, taking his time, his headlights cutting through the dark Missouri countryside. He is going the slow way. He is going to be a while.

Christopher Collings does not go inside his trailer. According to the confession he would give to law enforcement six days later, Collings got in his own vehicle the moment they left. He drove the direct route—the fast way—back toward Stella. He knew the road. He drove it hard. He arrived at the Spears house before Mahurin and Spears got back. He pulled up outside the house, and the lights were off. The house was quiet. Colleen was at work at the Walmart in Jane, Missouri. David Spears was still on the road with Mahurin, 10 to 15 minutes away.

There was no one inside that house except a little girl sleeping on the floor of her bedroom. Collings went inside. He found Rowan on the bedroom floor, exactly where the men had left her. She was asleep. She didn’t stir when he came in. She didn’t know he was there. He picked her up. He carried her out of the house. He put her in his truck and drove her back to his trailer in Wheaton.

Think about that drive. The middle of the night, November, cold. A man who has been drinking for hours behind the wheel, a sleeping child in the vehicle beside him, driving back the same roads he had just come from. The trailer, the dark property, the old vehicles sitting outside, and no one around for miles in any direction.

What happened inside that trailer is not something we detail here. What the autopsy would later confirm is that Rowan was violated, that she was hurt in ways that no child should ever be hurt. That the man who helped her with her homework did this to her in the dark, in a travel trailer on his family’s farm, while her mother was scanning groceries at a Walmart register 30 miles away.

Collings would tell investigators he had planned to take her home. That after what he had done, he intended to return her, to somehow put her back in her bed and walk away as if nothing had happened. He walked her outside the trailer, keeping her facing away from him. He kept the lights off. He did not speak. He was trying to make sure she couldn’t see his face, couldn’t hear his voice, couldn’t identify him.

They were moving toward his truck in the dark when it happened. Moonlight, a break in the clouds. A sudden wash of pale silver light across the yard. And in that moment, Rowan turned around. She looked at the man behind her. She saw his face. She recognized him. “Uncle Chris.”

By his own account, something in Christopher Collings shattered in that moment. He called it panic. He said he freaked out. He reached into the bed of an old pickup truck parked nearby and grabbed what he later described as a coil of chicken-house rope. He looped it around Rowan Ford’s neck.

The prosecutor at his trial would later stand before the jury and say what many believed: that Collings had never intended to let her go. That the story of wanting to bring her home was a lie he told himself or told the police. That a man who truly intended to return a child does not keep the lights off and stay silent on the walk to the truck.

He had gone to a deep, dark place, the prosecutor said. That led him to put that cord around her neck for what he described as minutes that seemed like an hour. When it was over, Rowan Ford was gone. She was 26 days away from her birthday. She was a fourth-grader who loved Barbie dolls and rode a purple bicycle and sometimes went to church alone because she wanted to. She weighed 62 pounds. She was just under 4 feet tall.

Christopher Collings put her in his truck. He drove her to a place in McDonald County—a sinkhole locally known as Fox Cave near the town of Powell, about 20 miles from Wheaton. He dropped her body in. He drove back to the trailer. He gathered the rope, the clothes he was wearing, his blood-stained mattress. He made a fire. He burned all of it. He tried to erase every trace of what he had done. Then he waited for morning to come.

At 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007, Colleen Munson came home from her overnight shift at the Walmart in Jane, Missouri. She walked into the house. She called Rowan’s name. Nothing came back. She checked the bedroom. She checked the rest of the house. She went outside and walked the neighborhood, calling out, looking up and down the street.

She came back inside. Her chest was tightening. She had that feeling that every parent dreads—the feeling that something is wrong in a way that can’t be explained away. She woke David Spears. She asked him where Rowan was. Spears told her Rowan was at a friend’s house. Colleen wanted to call the police immediately. Spears told her not to. Rowan was at a friend’s. She was fine. There was no reason to worry.

Hours passed. Rowan did not come home. The afternoon wore on. By the time the sun was dropping, Colleen had waited as long as she was going to wait. She called the Newton County Sheriff’s Department and reported her daughter missing. What followed was one of the largest searches in Newton County’s recent history. Law enforcement, FBI agents, community volunteers—hundreds of people fanning out across the area, searching fields, roads, properties, any place a little girl might be.

The community of Stella held its breath. People who didn’t know Rowan Ford drove out to help look for her. Her picture was shared. Her name was everywhere. But David Spears had not reported her missing for 8 to 10 hours after she disappeared. He had looked investigators in the eye and told them she was at a friend’s house, but he could not name the friend. His demeanor from the very first conversation with law enforcement struck everyone who spoke to him as wrong. Not grieving wrong, not scared wrong, just wrong in a way that made experienced investigators look at each other.

Newton County Sheriff Chris Jennings would later say that this case, this specific case, was the most horrendous he had ever encountered in his entire career as a law enforcement officer. He still carries Rowan’s picture in his wallet. He showed up at the execution. The first days of the search were agonizing. No sign of Rowan, no body, no trail. Just the expanding radius of people who knew something terrible had happened and couldn’t prove it yet.

On November 4th, detectives spoke with Collings in the parking lot of a local restaurant. He gave them a story that matched what Mahurin had told them about the evening—the liquor store, the pool table, the trip to Wheaton—but left out the marijuana entirely. He said he went home and went to sleep after Mahurin and Spears left. He said he had not spoken to Spears since that night. He said he had no idea Rowan was even missing until police told him. Nobody believed him, but believing him and proving it were two different things.

On November 5th, the FBI took full control of the investigation. Agents seized Spears’ pickup truck and a second vehicle—a car his mother, Myrna Spears, confirmed she had loaned her son that night after he called her around 1:30 a.m. asking to borrow it. David Spears had left the house at 1:30 in the morning, had his mother’s car, and didn’t come home for 5 and a half hours. Myrna Spears would say she was watching television and never checked on Rowan during that time.

Cadaver dogs were brought to the vehicles. Two dogs, working independently of each other, both alerted on Spears’ Suburban: the driver’s side door, the left rear quadrant, the driver’s seat, the rear cargo area. Both dogs, the same locations—the unmistakable scent of human remains. Agents also seized the hard drives from Spears’ computers. What they found there was deeply disturbing. Two years’ worth of material, some of it violent, some of it involving minors. The investigation was widening. The picture being built around David Spears was not the picture of a grieving stepfather.

And yet Collings was also in the frame. He was one of the last people seen at the house. He was visibly unsettled. He kept changing small details. And he kept doing something that experienced investigators found almost impossible to explain away: he kept seeking out Wheaton Police Chief Clinton Clark. Clark and Collings had known each other for 17 years. Their families went back. This was not a professional relationship; it was something older and more personal than that.

In the days after Rowan disappeared, Collings couldn’t seem to stay away from Clark. He flagged him down on the street. He showed up at his office. Or he called his cell phone. Every time, he said the same thing: he was helping search for Rowan. He loved her. He wanted her found. Clark told the FBI what he was seeing. He said he believed Collings was at a breaking point. He said he felt Collings knew something and was working up to telling it. The FBI authorized Clark to keep making contact.

Meanwhile, Collings was hearing things around town that were making him afraid. People were talking about vigilante justice. He overheard conversations at a local restaurant that chilled him. He told investigators he thought someone in a gray minivan was following him. He started asking to be separated from the other people being held at the facility because he feared for his safety. The community of Stella was furious, and Christopher Collings was starting to feel the walls closing in.

November 9th, six days after Rowan was reported missing. That morning, Fox Cave, the sinkhole near Powell in McDonald County, gave up what the search had been dreading. Rowan Ford’s body was found inside. She was nude from the waist down. She was wearing one sock. She was covered in leaves and debris. She had been there for six days in the November cold. The autopsy confirmed what the evidence had already suggested: ligature strangulation. She had also been violated before her death. The injuries were significant. She had not gone quietly. She had not simply been found asleep.

The same day her body was discovered, Clark met Collings at the Muncie Bridge on the edge of Wheaton. This meeting—what was said, what was recorded, what wasn’t, and in what order the Miranda warning was given—would be argued in federal court for over a decade. But what happened at that bridge, stripped of all the legal arguments, was this: Christopher Collings was ready to talk. When he sat across from Clark and began to speak, he raised his hands toward Clark with his wrists together—the gesture of a man preparing to be handcuffed. Clark told him that wasn’t necessary. Collings looked at him and said, “It will be.”

He told them everything. The drinking, the trip back to Stella, the house, the bedroom, Rowan asleep on the floor, his hands lifting her, his truck, his trailer. What he did there, walking her outside, the lights off, the silence, the moonlight, her face turning, the rope in the bed of the old pickup.

The law enforcement officers who heard that confession said they were genuinely shocked. Their working assumption—the assumption they had been building the investigation around—was that David Spears had killed Rowan and Collings simply knew what happened. That Collings was going to confirm Spears as the killer. Instead, Collings pointed entirely at himself, and he insisted over and over in every statement that David Spears was not involved. That Spears had nothing to do with what happened to Rowan.

After Collings’ first three statements, Newton County deputies went back to David Spears with fresh questions, and David Spears told them something different. This is where this case cracks open. This is the part that people who followed the story for 17 years cannot let go of. According to the transcript of Spears’ statement to Newton County deputies on November 9th—a transcript later cited in detail in Collings’ clemency petition and in multiple appeal filings—Spears gave his own account of that night.

He said he called his mother around 1:30 a.m. He borrowed her car. He drove to Collings’ trailer. He said he was there. He said he also had contact with Rowan. And then he said this—these words in his own statement to law enforcement: “I choke her with it. I realize she’s gone. She’s… she’s really gone.” Not Collings; Spears telling deputies he was the one who put his hands on that rope.

And there was something else. It was Spears who knew where the body was. It was Spears who led investigators to Fox Cave. You do not lead someone to a body in a remote sinkhole in McDonald County if you were home in bed while someone else put it there. The cadaver dogs had alerted on Spears’ Suburban—the car he had borrowed. The car he drove those five and a half hours in the middle of the night. His computer contained material that spoke to a profound and disturbing interest in the violation of the vulnerable. He had lied for days about where Rowan was, and now he had given a statement saying he was there, that he was the one who strangled her.

Two men, two confessions, completely irreconcilable accounts of who killed Rowan Ford. Both men were arrested on November 9th, and both were charged identically: one count of first-degree murder, one count of forcible rape, one count of statutory rape. In May 2008, the state announced it intended to seek the death penalty for both Collings and Spears. Both men pleaded not guilty, but the trials were never going to be equal, and the sequence in which they happened was going to determine everything.

Collings went first. By early 2012, five years after the crime, the case had been moved to Phelps County because of the extensive publicity in Newton County. A jury was drawn from Platte County. On March 12th, 2012, the trial began. David Spears, still technically awaiting his own trial, appeared in that courtroom as a witness for the prosecution.

The case against Collings rested almost entirely on one thing: the confession. Specifically, on the testimony of Clinton Clark, the Wheaton police chief—the man with 17 years of personal history with the condemned, the man who had been authorized by the FBI to maintain contact with Collings throughout the week, who had met him at the Muncie bridge, who had obtained the first unrecorded statement before reading him his rights. Clark was the prosecution’s star witness. Without Clark’s testimony about the circumstances and content of Collings’ confession, the case was significantly weaker. The jury needed to believe Clinton Clark.

What the jury never knew—what was never disclosed to the defense during the trial, during the direct appeal, or during the initial post-conviction proceedings—was that Clinton Clark had a criminal record. Four convictions, all related to going absent without leave during his military service in the Vietnam era. He had been incarcerated for several months as a result of those convictions. The prosecution knew. The prosecution did not tell the defense. Under Brady v. Maryland, one of the most foundational legal requirements in the American justice system, prosecutors are required to hand over any evidence that could undermine the credibility of their own witnesses. Clark’s convictions went directly to whether a jury should trust his word. The jury never got to make that judgment. They were never given the chance.

The jury also never heard what would later be discovered about Collings’ brain. Years after his conviction, a neurologist reviewed MRI images, EEG results, and other diagnostic materials. The findings were significant: structural abnormalities in the right temporal lobe, affecting the circuits responsible for awareness, judgment, deliberation, emotional regulation, and the ability to inhibit impulsive behavior. When combined with the extreme level of intoxication documented that night—five six-packs of malt liquor on top of marijuana—the neurologist concluded that Collings’ capacity for deliberate, premeditated decision-making would have been severely compromised.

The jury never heard any of this. They sentenced him based on what they were given, and what they were given was incomplete. At the penalty phase, six witnesses testified about the impact of Rowan’s life and death. Her teachers, her family, and Colleen Munson, who took the stand and spoke about her daughter. She talked about Rowan’s love of dolls, her bike, her church. How she talked about that last moment before her shift. Rowan running downstairs, the hug, the kiss. She said she had not had much of a life since the night she came home to an empty house.

The jury deliberated. They came back with death. March 20th, 2012: Christopher Leroy Collings, guilty of first-degree murder, sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Then, six months later, the prosecution turned to David Spears. On September 26th, 2012, the first-degree murder charge against Spears was withdrawn. All the rape charges were withdrawn. David Spears pleaded guilty to child endangerment and hindering prosecution—significantly reduced felony charges. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison. With credit for time served since his 2007 arrest, he served roughly seven years.

He walked out of prison in March of 2015—the man whose own mouth had said, “I choke her with it.” The man whose vehicle cadaver dogs had hit on twice, independently. The man who led police to the body. The man whose computer contained two years of disturbing material targeting the vulnerable. Home in 2015, while Christopher Collings began the slow grind of death row appeals.

The story of David Spears after his release is its own category of stunning. Shortly after walking out of prison, while still technically on probation, Spears went to work for the Missouri State Public Defender’s office. He was hired by a district defender named Stephen Reynolds, based in Clayton, Missouri. Stephen Reynolds was the husband of Sharon Turlington. Sharon Turlington was the attorney who had represented David Spears at trial—the co-defendant—working for the public defender’s office, hired by his former defense attorney’s husband.

Collings’ attorneys flagged this in federal court. They argued it created a conflict of interest so deep that it had affected how Collings was represented—that with Spears embedded in the same office system, Collings could never receive truly independent counsel on whether to pursue a plea to a lesser charge. One of Collings’ own public defenders gave a sworn declaration on the issue. No court granted relief.

As of 2024, David Spears was earning $40,842 a year working for the Howell County Public Defender’s office in West Plains, Missouri. When a reporter reached him at that office on the day of Collings’ execution and asked if he had a comment, Spears said, “Ma’am, you called me at work. I have no comment. Please don’t call my place of work again.”

Between 2012 and 2024, Christopher Collings filed appeals in every court that would hear them. Missouri Supreme Court denied. 2014, Rule 29.15 post-conviction motion denied. 2018, United States District Court, Eastern District of Missouri denied. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals denied. 2023, United States Supreme Court denied cert twice, the last time in 2024. In June 2024, he filed a writ of habeas corpus back at the Missouri Supreme Court, specifically targeting the withheld Clark criminal record. He argued that Brady v. Maryland had been violated. He argued that the jury had been denied the evidence it needed to properly evaluate the only witness whose testimony truly held the case together.

The Missouri Supreme Court denied the writ. In August 2024, the Missouri Supreme Court set the execution date: December 3rd, 2024, 6:00 p.m.

Collings’ attorneys filed a clemency petition with Governor Mike Parson, laying out the entire record: Clark’s hidden convictions, the brain abnormalities, the brutal childhood, the sentencing disparity with Spears, the conflict of interest in the public defender’s office, and the three jurors who had since stated on the record that they would have voted for life rather than death had they known the full picture. Three jurors on the record saying they were not given what they needed.

Governor Parson reviewed it all. On December 2nd, 2024, the day before the execution, he issued his denial. His statement: “Mr. Collings has received every protection afforded by the Missouri and United States Constitutions, and Mr. Collings’ conviction and sentence remain for his horrendous and callous crime. The state of Missouri will carry out Mr. Collings’ sentence according to the court’s order and deliver justice.” The US Supreme Court denied a final emergency stay. It was done.

Before we go back to that execution chamber, one paragraph and one paragraph only about who Christopher Collings was before he became a death row number. He was born to parents who were both behind bars by the time he was 6 months old. He was separated from his five siblings and placed into foster care, where he was physically abused by the people who were supposed to protect him. He was violated as a child more than once by people in positions of trust. His attorney at trial described it plainly: “Their parents were involved in crime and substance abuse, and the children paid the price.”

He began drinking and using drugs as a teenager. He never formed stable attachments to anyone. He had no prior criminal record before November 3rd, 2007. On death row, he stayed sober. He participated in restorative justice programs. He trained dogs for the Puppies for Parole program. He had no major violations across 12 years of incarceration. None of that changes what he did to Rowan Ford, but the jury that sentenced him to death was not given the full picture of who he was or how his mind worked. And that is a fact that three of his own jurors have since confirmed on the record.

December 3rd, 2024, 6:00 p.m., Bonne Terre, Missouri. We are back where we started. Christopher Leroy Collings is brought into the execution chamber at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center. A spiritual advisor stands at his side. He has already written out his final words. His final meal had been a bacon cheeseburger, breaded mushrooms, tater tots, and a chef salad.

The witnesses are in their places. Colleen Munson is in the gallery. She is still. She has waited 17 years for this specific hour, this specific room, this specific moment when the state of Missouri makes good on what a jury decided in 2012. The single dose of pentobarbital is administered. Witnesses would later describe what they saw: the condemned breathed heavily. He swallowed hard. After a few seconds, all movement stopped.

Nine minutes after the injection, at 6:10 p.m., Christopher Leroy Collings was pronounced dead. His final statement was read: “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 that you are able to get closure and move on. Regardless of which side of this situation that you are on, you are in my prayers and I hope to see you in heaven one day.”

His attorneys issued a statement afterward. They said he was taken too early from this Earth. They said what happened that night in Bonne Terre was an act of vengeance. Governor Parson, for his part, said he hoped all those who knew and loved Rowan might find peace in knowing that justice has been done.

Former Barry County Sheriff Mick Epperly, the man who first investigated this case back in 2007, attended the execution. He had retired since then, but he was there. He said it was the most unforgettable case of his entire law enforcement career and that the condemned deserved what he received.

Newton County Sheriff Chris Jennings was also in that room. He had said publicly, when the execution date was announced, that he had waited for that day. That Rowan’s case was the most horrendous thing he had ever seen in his career. That he still carries her picture. He was there when it was over.

Rowan Damia Ford was born on April 11th, 1998. She was taken from this world on November 3rd, 2007. She would have been 26 years old today. She loved Barbie dolls. She rode a purple bicycle through the streets of Stella. She asked for her room to be painted…