Two missing teenage girls have been found dead in a house in Oklahoma, along with their suspected abductor and four other people, authorities say.
Brittany Brewer, 15, and Ivy Webster, 14, were named in an Amber Alert on Monday morning after disappearing while in the company of a convicted rapist named Jesse McFadden, 39.
But on Monday afternoon Okmulgee County sheriff Eddy Rice said the two girls and Mr McFadden are believed to be among seven dead bodies discovered in a rural home east of the city of Henryetta, about 50 miles south of Tulsa.
Mr Rice said that while he was still waiting for the identities of the bodies to be confirmed, “we believe we have found everything that we were seeking this morning”.
Asked if his force had ever seen anything like this, he said: ”Not this magnitude, no. We've had our share of troubles and woes, but this one's pretty bad.”
According to local broadcaster KOTV-DT, the girls had gone to spend the weekend with Mr McFadden, which Ms Brewer's father said had happened many times before without incident.
They were meant to be back on Sunday night but did not reappear, triggering a search.
Simultaneously, police were reportedly seeking Mr McFadden because he did not appear in court on Monday morning to be tried on charges of sexual contact with a minor while he was still in prison in 2016.
Oklahoma prison records show that Mr McFadden was jailed in 2003 for first-degree rape, serving just under 16 years until being released in October 2020
"Brittany was an outgoing person," Ms Brewer's father Nathan Brewer told KOTV. "She actually was selected to be Miss Henryetta in [an upcoming] pageant in Tulsa, and now she ain't gonna make it because she' dead. She's gone."
Sheriff Rice declined to give any further details of what his officers found inside the rural ranch but said there now appeared to be "no other threat to the community" from this case.
"Our hearts go out to the families and friends, schoolmates, and everyone else. It's just a tragedy in Okmulgee," he said.
