More than two years after a 4-year-old girl vanished while riding her tricycle outside her suburban home, police said a former neighbor confessed Friday to abducting and strangling her.
Mark Christie, 24, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Kali Poulton, whose disappearance in May 1994 mystified police and prompted a nationwide search.Monroe County Sheriff Andrew Meloni said a tip led to the arrest of Christie, who had lived in the same fenced-in housing estate in suburban Pittsford a few doors away from where Kali lived with her mother, Judy Gifford. He later moved to the town of Ganonda near Rochester.
Christie was arraigned Friday night in Pittsford Town Court and was being held in the Monroe County Jail.
Police said Christie told them he killed the girl soon he after he abducted her. They said the body has not been found but a search is under way. They would not reveal any more details.
It was around dinnertime on
May 23, 1994, when Kali got her pink-and-white Big Wheel out of the shed. She rode back and forth on the sidewalk, her mother glimpsing at her periodically through the window. When Gifford came out a few minutes later, Kali and her tricycle had vanished.
Gifford, 32, was notified of the arrest by telephone. She has passed out posters at toll booths and county fairs, consulted psychics, appeared on talk shows, persuaded airlines to stuff Kali's picture in ticket jackets and pediatricians to keep missing children albums.
Her daughter's disappearance was featured on "America's Most Wanted."
"This certainly comes as a shock," she said. "I always felt that she was alive and I was going to find her and bring her home.
"We are totally devastated, in shock, totally blindsided by this as we were the day she disappeared," she said, sobbing in her doorway next to her former husband, David Poulton.