The Krug Park Killers

Kaytlin Root was seventeen and lived in St. Joseph, Missouri. In October 2016 she received Facebook messages from a stranger calling herself “Amanda Panda,” who asked to meet and told her to keep it quiet. The sender was Amanda Bennett, a week short of turning seventeen, and her boyfriend, Sebastian Dowell, was with her. Investigators later learned the pair had reached out to several people online. Kaytlin was the only one who answered.

The couple picked Kaytlin up and took her to Krug Park, a wooded city park, and she never came home. On October 16, a runner found her body on a trail. She had been strangled and stabbed. Detectives recovered pieces of her broken phone, and her Facebook Messenger history pointed to Bennett and Dowell. Her last photo showed a convenience store, whose video caught a green Hyundai Santa Fe like one parked at Bennett’s home. Bennett later told the court the killing was meant as a sacrifice to demons.

Bennett was certified to stand trial as an adult and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in February 2017. Dowell, eighteen, entered the same plea in March. In May 2017 both were sentenced to life in prison. The prosecutor said he chose second-degree murder so that a parole board could review each of them after roughly twenty-five years, and Kaytlin’s mother said she would attend every hearing.