Twenty-two hours before William Joseph McCullen was arrested Tuesday, his breathless voice on the phone sounded panicked. He had just dialed 911.
“Yes, ma’am, my oldest daughter, I was taking a nap, I just woke up and I can’t find her anywhere.”
He said he awoke to the door of his home in Bessemer City, N.C., swung open and the 3-year-old girl he’d been watching — Jordyn Ann Dumont — mysteriously gone. He went outside and next door to the neighbors, calling her name aloud. No reply. “I can’t find her,” he kept repeating.
“She may have fallen asleep,” the dispatcher said, calmly. “I need you to go look under the bed while I send people that way, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the man.
McCullen, 25, abandoned the phone, a landline receiver with a cord, leaving behind silence for 36 seconds. Then his voice — desperate now — rushed back.
“She’s not here!” he said. “She’s not here!”
Between heaves, McCullen described the missing little girl. White female. Dirty blonde hair. Jean shorts. Minnie Mouse shirt. She is supposed to turn 4 next month, he cries. Her mother would be home soon from work.
“Baby, please come out,” his voice pleads on the call. “I don’t know if she’s just hiding or what. I don’t know, I can’t find her anywhere, she don’t do this. The door was just wide open and I can’t find her!”
The line fills with sobs, then falls silent again. The dispatcher mutters “he’s freaking,” just before the voice returns once more.
“Yes, ma’am,” the man says. “They’re here now.”
The call ends.
For nearly 19 hours, law enforcement in helicopters and hundreds of community members with flashlights searched for the missing toddler. They combed the woods near the family home in Bessemer City hoping for signs of the girl.
Amid the desperate search, McCullen told a WSOC-TV reporter it all felt “like a bad dream.”
On Tuesday morning, Gaston County Police shut down the search. Jordyn’s body had been found, reported the TV station, about 500 yards from her home. It was wrapped in a sheet.
Two hours later, McCullen was arrested in connection with the child’s death.
At a news conference later that day, Gaston County Police Chief Joseph Ramey said McCullen faces a charge of first-degree murder. The chief would not say precisely where Jordyn was found, whether her body was buried or how she died. He did, however, say that authorities think she’d been dead for 24 to 36 hours — and that her body had been moved to the woods after she was killed.
Ramey would not reveal what evidence led authorities to arrest McCullen, only that there is “information” they believe proves “he is the cause of her death.”
“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family in this difficult time,” Ramey said.
On the day Jordyn disappeared, McCullen — her mother’s boyfriend — told police he was babysitting her and another child, 1-year-old Angel. He and Jordyn’s mother, Jaylene Dumont, had the baby last year after meeting in Nebraska, McCullen’s sister told the Gaston Gazette. Even though McCullen wasn’t Jordyn’s biological father, he considered the girl his own daughter, the newspaper reported.
“He’s just always talked about them with so much love,” the sister, Kimberly Espinoza, told the Gazette. “Every time I talked to him, it was always about his girls and what he was doing with them.”
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SOURCE: Katie Mettler
The Washington Post
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