In an affidavit that reads like gothic fiction, investigators describe how a teen reunited with her birth mother last year on an isolated farm in Missouri — only to be tortured there, forced to crawl through hog pens and have salt rubbed in her wounds, and then finally murdered last month and burned in a fire pit.

Rebecca Ruud, 39, was arrested Monday by Ozark County sheriff’s deputies and charged, among other crimes, with the first-degree murder of Savannah Leckie, whom she had given up for adoption at birth, 16 years before.

The baby had been taken in by a husband and wife in Minnesota, according to sheriff’s documents, and raised there nearly all her life.

But Savannah’s adoptive parents eventually divorced, and by late 2016 the teen was having trouble getting along with her adoptive mother’s new boyfriend.

In November 2016, Ruud, who had been in casual contact with Leckie for years, “agreed to take Savannah back and she was delivered to Ruud in Ozark County,”wrote a sheriff’s deputy, as he recounted all the things the girl would subsequently endure.

[She was abducted from a hospital as a newborn. 18 years later, she met her birth parents.]

A reunited family and a new business

A truck driver and volunteer firefighter, Ruud lived on an 81-acre farm near Theodosia — close to the Arkansas border, miles from the nearest paved road.

In photos on Ruud’s Facebook feed, life after reuniting with her daughter appeared idyllic: all baby goats and pretty dresses.

“She looks just like you,” a friend wrote beneath a photo of mother and daughter last December.

In June, Ruud announced that the pair had even started a family business, making soap, according to the Ozark County Times.

“She wanted this so badly,” she wrote on Facebook of her daughter. “To combine two landmark events, her Sweet 16, and the official opening of Our Hidden Holler Farm soap business.”

But offline, a sheriff’s investigator wrote, the girl’s new life was bleak.

Hidden Holler Farm

“Savannah has been home-schooled and has almost no social contact,” he wrote.

She lived, slept and studied on a property with a generator providing the only electricity, and a well pump for water.

Ruud and her boyfriend slept in a converted metal building, like a barn, the deputy wrote in the affidavit. Savannah slept beside them in a camper with a broken air conditioner.

“Savannah’s inability to adapt to life on the farm” became a growing irritant to Ruud, according to the affidavit.

Eventually, she worried that the cost of caring for the girl would cost her the farm.

“It’s to the point that I either need more help to care for her, or I can do nothing with her,” Ruud allegedly wrote to Savannah’s adoptive mother in late June, a few weeks before the girl disappeared.

A strange fire

On July 18, Ruud reported a fire burning at the top of a hill on her property. Less than an acre of brush had burned, and firefighters put it out.

But when they returned to the family’s makeshift living quarters and asked for water, Ruud refused, according to the affidavit. She said Savannah got a small burn in the fire, and was laying down and couldn’t be disturbed.

Ruud wouldn’t let anyone close to the girl’s camper, the firefighters reported.

Two days later, Ruud called the sheriff’s office. Her daughter had disappeared overnight, she reported. Her favorite pillow, blanket and coloring kit were missing.

“I think she’s a runaway,” Ruud said, according to the affidavit. “Savannah is blaming herself for the fire.”

[A grieving father buried a man he thought was his son — who turned up alive a week later]

Rescuers fanned out across the woods and fields. A helicopter and plane searched from above, and missing posters went out as the day passed with no sign.

Investigators began to get suspicious.

Hog pen

Ruud brought Savannah’s computer to the local fire department on July 24, according to the affidavit, and asked a technician there to examine it.

“I considered this to be unusual considering law enforcement were actively searching for information leading to Savannah’s disappearance,” a sheriff’s deputy wrote.

The same day, an ex-boyfriend of Ruud’s told investigators he’d seen the girl crawling through hog pens and bathing in ponds before she went missing. The man said Savannah had once cut her arm, an investigator wrote, and “Ruud scrubbed the affected area with alcohol and salt on a daily basis as a form of discipline.”

Ruud and her current boyfriend, Robert Peat Jr., were interviewed at the sheriff’s office, according to the affidavit, where the mother allegedly admitted to rubbing salt in Savannah’s cut, wrestling the girl in the mud of a pig pen, and other severe forms of discipline.

But the couple were becoming less and less cooperative as the search went on, an investigator wrote.

Deputies returned to the farm on Aug. 4 — with dogs, state police and a search warrant. They now suspected that Savannah had never left the property.

Rebecca Ruud was charged Tuesday with murder in the death of her 16-year-old biological daughter. (AP/Ozark County Sheriff’s Office)

A marriage and ash

The farm looked different that morning, an investigator wrote. Gates and doors that had been open on previous visits were now chained and locked.

Some time after investigators arrived, an affidavit states, Ruud and Peat abruptly left their home.

They drove for nearly 100 miles, to Summersville, and married each other there, on the same day police combed the farm.

Investigators searched carefully — around the barn and the camper where Savannah had lived, and the vacant buildings and derelict vehicles that surrounded it.

A few hundred yards from the residences, they found a pile of fresh leaves and branches. The brush pile was speckled with cigarette butts and surrounded by what a deputy described in the affidavit as “charred earth.”

The searchers lifted the brush. A deposit of light ash lay beneath it.

In the ash, they sifted out a button, imprinted with little ducks, and finger bones and vertebrae and teeth.

Lye

The bones were human, a forensic investigator in Springfield told the Ozark County sheriff. They’d been burned at a very high temperature, and had deteriorated so badly that she suspected some chemical was used.

The sheriff mentioned the Hidden Holler Farm soap-making enterprise, according to an affidavit, and that his deputies had seen drums of chemicals on the property. He mentioned that soap was made with caustic lye.

“That would do it,” the forensic investigator said. So the sheriff got a second search warrant.

Deputies returned to the farm on Aug. 9. The goats and the couple’s guns had disappeared, they noted.

They went back over the property, and the ash pile they’d searched before. According to documents published by the Ozark County Times, investigators left with a box of girl’s clothing; hair; a knife; a meat grinder; and more than two dozen bottles of lye.

“We’re dealing with someone who’s tried to dispose of evidence,” Ozark County Sheriff Darrin Reed told OzarksFirst.com.

‘Deliberately and methodically’

Reed didn’t immediately return a message about the case. Ruud could not be reached, and it’s unclear if she has a lawyer.

But as investigators studied evidence seized from the farm and continued to investigate this month, they learned that Ruud and her new husband had purchased bus tickets to leave the state.

So they asked for an arrest warrant this week.

“I believe Ms. Ruud deliberately and methodically caused the death of Savannah Leckie and then attempted to conceal it by destroying evidence and her remains by fire,” a sheriff’s deputy wrote to a judge, who signed the request and issued the warrant.

Two Greyhound buses were to leave Springfield, Mo., on Monday, according to the affidavit — taking Ruud to Kansas and Peat to Tennessee.

The sheriff, Reed, and two deputies drove to the station, arrested Ruud and returned her to the Ozark County jail.

She was charged Tuesday with first-degree and second-degree murder, fatal abuse of a child, tampering with evidence and abandoning a corpse — and “more charges are forthcoming on any individual that was involved in aiding or tampering in this investigation,” Reed wrote in a news release.

The sheriff told the Ozark County Times he wants the mother put to death.

Since Florida reinstated the death penalty in 1976, at least 18 black men have been executed for killing white victims there, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center.

But in Florida’s modern history no white man has been executed for killing a black victim.

On Thursday, Mark James Asay — a former member of a prison white supremacist gang and once inked with a swastika tattoo — is scheduled to become the first, by way of lethal injection with a drug never before used in a U.S. execution.

Statistics showing racial disparities in application of the death sentence have been among the chief weapons of capital punishment opponents, like Adora Obi Nweze, president of the Florida State Conference NAACP, who told the Miami Herald that Asay’s historical case only highlights how black inmates are disproportionately sentenced.

She told the newspaper that even Asay shouldn’t be executed.

And Asay’s sentence won’t undo the past, Mark Elliott, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told the Associated Press.

“This does nothing to change the 170-year-long history of Florida not executing whites for killing blacks,” Elliot said.

Nationally, the racial pattern of death sentences, while not so stark as it is in Florida, leans sharply the same way. Since 1976, 20 whites have been executed for murdering blacks, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, while 288 blacks have been put to death for killing whites.

Asay was convicted in 1988 of two racially motivated murders on the same night in Jacksonville, Fla. Witnesses and a jail house informant testified that Asay used racial slurs during the first murder and after the second. The jury, unanimous in its verdict, sentenced him to death by a 9-3 vote.

But his execution date was delayed for nearly two years, caught in legal limbo over a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that determined Florida’s death penalty system was unconstitutional. In Hurst v. Florida, the high court ruled that the state’s sentencing scheme gave too much power to judges over juries. Executions screeched to a halt while Florida lawmakers crafted new legislation — twice — that ultimately required a jury to unanimously agree before sentencing someone to death.

The Hurst decision left hundreds of capital punishment cases in limbo. Eventually the state supreme court ruled that only inmates sentenced to death after 2002, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a different death penalty case, would be allowed new hearings.

Asay was not one of those inmates. His attorneys appealed the decision without success.

Asay will be the first death row inmate to die in Florida since theHurst decision, which was issued more than 18 months ago. He’ll also be the first to die by Florida’s new execution drug cocktail, a combination of etomidate, rocuronium bromide and potassium acetate, reported the Associated Press.

Etomidate has never been used in an execution before, Jen Moreno, a lethal injection expert who works as a staff attorney at the University of California at Berkeley Law School’s death penalty clinic, told the AP. It will be administered first, followed by the paralytic rocuronium bromide. Finally, the potassium acetate will stop the heart.

Moreno said there are “outstanding questions” about whether etomidate, an anesthetic, will “do what it needs to do during an execution.”

“The state hasn’t provided any information about why it has selected this drug,” Moreno told the AP.

The Florida Supreme Court signed off on the drug and Assay appealed, but was rejected. In a dissenting opinion, one state justice wrote that the execution was rushed and Asay was being treated as “the proverbial guinea pig of its newest lethal injection protocol,” reported the News Service of Florida.

But state corrections officials defended the choice.

“The Florida Department of Corrections follows the law and carries out the sentence of the court,” Michelle Glady, the Florida Department of Corrections’ spokeswoman, said in a statement to the AP. “This is the Department’s most solemn duty and the foremost objective with the lethal injection procedure is a humane and dignified process.”

Another appeal, unanimously rejected earlier this week, stemmed from the double-murder case’s racial implications. For decades, Asay’s victims, 34-year-old Robert Lee Booker and 26-year-old Robert McDowell, were classified in legal documents as black. Their race, prosecutors argued, was what motivated Asay’s violent behavior in 1987.

But, it turns out, McDowell was biracial — white and Hispanic — not black.

The court apologized for the error and issued a rare mea culpa, but ultimately ruled that their mistake had no bearing on the overall outcome of Asay’s death sentence.

McDowell, who had been described as “a black man dressed as a woman,” was also “known to friends and neighbors as Renee Torres,” the state court wrote.

“Torres was identified at trial by everyone who testified as white and Hispanic. Renee Torres nee Robert McDowell may have been either white or mixed-race, Hispanic but was not a black man,” the Supreme Court wrote. “We regret our previous error.”

Asay’s attorneys argued that the mistake granted him the right to a new hearing because prosecutors had built their original case on the man’s alleged racial animus. The justices disagreed.

“While this court may have mislabeled the racial identity of the victim in its prior opinions, this fact does not negatively affect this court’s final determination,” they wrote Monday afternoon,according to the News Service of Florida.

In a jailhouse interview this week with News 4 Jax, Asay admitted to killing McDowell but maintained he never shot Booker. He was drunk that night, he told the TV station, but racism had nothing to do with his actions. Asay claimed he was never a white supremacist and only joined the prison gang for safety while he was serving time in his late teens in Texas. The tattoos, he told News 4 Jax, were a gang requirement. Asay said he has since covered them up or burned them off.

At trial, prosecutors and witnesses presented a far different story.

The night of the murders, they said, Asay was out drinking with his brother and a friend in Jacksonville, Fla. They closed down a bar and went looking for prostitutes. The friend had offered to buy them all oral sex.

Asay’s brother was inside his vehicle and speaking to Booker, who stood outside. Asay approached and called Booker a “n—–,” then pulled a gun and shot the man in the stomach. He ran but died from internal bleeding. His body was found by a nearby home.

Asay and the friend, “Bubba” McQuinn, fled in Asay’s red truck. McQuinn testified in court that he asked Asay why he shot Booker, and Asay responded: “Because you got to show a n—– who is boss.”

The two kept looking for prostitutes, found McDowell and drove into a nearby alley. McQuinn testified that Asay stood watch outside while McDowell climbed into the truck. Then Asay grabbed McDowell by the arm and shot six times.

In his interview with News 4 Jax, Asay said he had no intention of killing McDowell, whom he claimed was a friend. Asay said the dispute was over stolen money.

Unless a court or Florida’s governor steps in, Asay will be executed Thursday evening after 6 p.m. He has served 36 years of his life in prison and told News 4 Jax he is “not a violent person or threat to society.”

“If the purpose of prison is not accomplished now, it’s never going to be accomplished. If the purpose is just to protect me from society and protect society from me, okay, I accept that,” Asay told the TV station. “But if the government is like, ‘Well, we can’t be sure,’ then I’m prepared to submit to the execution Thursday and go on and be at peace with my Lord.”

(The Washington Post)

U.N. Issues Order To Trump As Officials Claim ‘Warning’ Signs, Urgent Action

The Islamic State militant group (ISIS) is facing another defeat as the Russian-backed forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad encircle the forces of the radical Islamist militants in desert in central Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitoring group that uses an extensive network of sources on the ground in Syria and is opposed to the Assad regime, said Thursday that Syrian military forces joined up from the north and south of the Badiya desert area overnight.

ISIS has controlled the territory since 2014 but the Syrian regime has been emboldened by support from Moscow and Iran.

The Badiya desert region stretches between central Syria and the border area near Jordan and Iraq. A key battle that is continuing between the Syrian troops and ISIS fighters is for the town of Sukhnah.

While the U.S.-led coalition is supporting an Arab-Kurdish coalition to recapture the eastern city of Raqqa, the Syrian regime has focused on recapturing other stretches of territory from ISIS, advancing on the eastern province of Deir Ezzor where ISIS still controls the cities of Deir Ezzor and Mayadin.

A general view taken on August 13, 2017 shows an Islamic State (ISIS) group poster in the central Syrian town of Al-Sukhnah on August 13, 2017 as pro-government fighters clear the area after taking control of the city situated in the county's large desert area called the Badiya.STRINGER/AFP/GETTY

Victory for the Syrian government in this region would boost Damascus and Moscow’s hope of recapturing Deir Ezzor from ISIS, one of the last bastions of the group in the country.

Assad has attempted to paint the six-year-long civil war as a battle against extremists but critics point out that ISIS emerged in 2014 amid the chaos in the country, when the Syrian leader released hardened jihadists from jail, many of which went on to join the Islamist insurgency.

Rights groups, the U.N. and western governments have all pointed to evidence that indicates that Assad has used chemical weapons against civilian populations and torture prisons to detain opposition activists, even using a crematorium at the notorious Saydnaya prison complex to remove evidence of the hundreds of people hanged at the compound.

The war has created one of the worst humanitarian crises since the Second World War, with more than 400,000 dead, millions displaced internally and externally and the country left in ruins.

(Newsweek)