The remains of an Ozark County teenager, 16-year-old Savannah Leckie, have been positively identified. KY3 news reports Ozark County Sheriff Darin Reed says the homicide investigation has intensified after the determination.
Leckie disappeared last month from her home near Longrun.
Investigators used dental records and other evidence to confirm the identity after human remains were found in Ozark County near the home, located on County Road 905, where Leckie lived with her biological mother Rebecca Ruud.
Search documents list Ruud and Robert Peat Jr., Ruud’s boyfriend, as suspects. The Ozark County Sheriff’s Department, Missouri State Highway Patrol investigators, and anthropologists have been searching Ruud’s property for evidence.
Leckie was adopted to a family in Minnesota at birth, but maintained periodic contact with Ruud. According to a search warrant application, Ruud was told Leckie could not get along with her adoptive mom’s new boyfriend, and came to live with Ruud in Ozark county.
A search warrant application says Leckie’s living quarters consisted of a pull-behind camper trailer with electricity from a generator. Ruud and her boyfriend, Robert Peat Jr., lived in 1,850-square-foot metal building. The property is 81 acres, partially wooded and partly open fields.
As Theodosia volunteer firefighters and Ozark County sheriff’s deputies searched the terrain for days for Leckie, Ruud provided searchers with several of Leckies’s personal belongings. But investigators noted Ruud did not provide the computer that she regularly used; instead, Ruud sent it to a computer technician to be examined.
Ruud’s ex-boyfriend told investigators that he saw Ruud discipline Leckie by forcing her to crawl through a hog pen, then bathe in a pond, according to a search warrant application.
Those applications say Ruud and Peat have become increasingly less cooperative and have questioned investigators’ motives and activities during the search for Leckie.
Howell County records show Robert Peat Jr. and Rebecca Ruud got married on Friday, Aug. 4. It’s the same day that investigators first found human remains on Ruud’s property. In some cases, being married can prevent spouses from having to testify against one another, but Sheriff Reed says in a case where the victim is under 18, the special privilege does not apply.
No charges have been filed yet in this case according to the Ozark County Prosecutor’s office.
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