LETHBRIDGE, Alberta — Police said Sunday they have charged a family friend with killing a 5-year-old girl whose body was found in a farmer’s field in Alberta, Canada.
Harold Anthony Gallup, 31, was charged Saturday with kidnapping and killing Jessica Koopmans, said police in Lethbridge, about 40 miles north of the Montana border.
The girl’s mother, Sylvia Koopmans, said Gallup was a family friend who frequently played with her two daughters. Gallup was the boyfriend of her best friend, Koopmans said.
“He’d been around and the kids like him — somebody I actually trusted to be in my house,” Koopmans said. She said she felt “pure anger” toward Gallup.
Jessica disappeared May 4 after she went to play with a friend down the block. Her bruised and naked body was found a week later in a field about 30 miles away.
Hundreds of people attended her funeral on Friday.
The two people who discovered the body, Gunther Lueder and Wilma Beaudry, said they planned to build a memorial for the girl in the field where she was found.
They had been walking along a rural road when they spotted what appeared to a doll lying on a pile of branches. Afterward, Lueder said, “the first four days, I couldn’t sleep.”
