1854
In 1854 men from Platte City, Missouri crossed the Missouri River and staked out a town, naming it for David Atchison, a Missouri senator.
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They met at the Medical Lodge, where both worked, and by the winter of 1991 he was living with her though she was married. Trina had grown up in Atchison and on 9 April 1986 married Thomas E. Smith; they had two daughters, China Dawn and Tommy Joe.
The marriage was violent and the affair was no secret. Trina told friends and co-workers she was torn between the two men, and police had repeatedly been called to mediate.
Trina filed for divorce that December but neither pursued it. On 5 February 1992, after an argument with her, Thomas set himself on fire and was taken to hospital, where he was still recovering on the night she died.
The next afternoon two men driving a dirt road a few miles outside Atchison found a body about twenty yards over the bank, in a wooded area: Trina, five foot two and about 200 pounds, naked, with leaves and mud on her body and feet. The earth up the embankment was disturbed, as though she had been dragged down.
She was elaborately bound: a nylon rope tied at her wrists ran up her back and around her neck several times, then down to her ankles, and pantyhose were wrapped around her neck beneath the ropes. The ropes were so tight the pathologist had to pull them while an assistant cut them away. There were no marks of a struggle except an abrasion on her forehead. He concluded she died of ligature strangulation, the ligatures tight enough to cut off her air and kill her within five minutes, and that a self-induced strangling would more likely have been an accident than deliberate. He found recent stretching and a small tear of the anal mucosa, possibly from anal intercourse but unconfirmed. Sheriff Dennis Parker said the body was found at 4.35 p.m. and that the strangulation had happened ten to sixteen hours earlier.
On the day the body was found he gave two accounts. He first said he had taken her to her house, made love, argued and left her at his new girlfriend's. Hours later he changed everything: they had gone to the cemetery, where she knew he had always wanted to have sex with her; he tied her up, they had sex in the back seat and at her invitation he gagged her with pantyhose. He said he attempted anal sex but stopped because he did not want to hurt her. Afterwards she straightened her legs, the rope round her neck tightened and he could not undo it. He drove towards Atchison with her bound, heard a gurgle and opened the back door; she rolled out, and seeing headlights he rolled her to the side of the road meaning to return, and she rolled down the hill.
Within a day investigators searched his apartment and car. They photographed restraint devices hooked under both sides of his bed, white cord on the bedroom floor and handcuffs on the front-room wall, and seized two notebooks he called his captain's logs, more than 200 typed pages of fantasy and diary from 1989 to 1992, which the state said set out plans to control women and sometimes to kill them and make the deaths look like suicides. They also took a dog choker chain with a padlock and no key from his car, and a bible marked at 2 Kings 9:30, the passage about Jezebel's violent death, from the trunk.
His ex-wife testified that they had engaged in bondage 40 to 50 times during their marriage, that he demanded it, sometimes tied her up by force when she objected and often left her tied up.
In 2021 he was found with contraband again.