Savage by name
But was this once-innocent young man also savage by nature?
Kimberly Daily was a sweet 16-yearold with a heart of gold. About to begin a new year – the equivalent of our sixth form – at her school in Washington, US, Kimmie was just starting to learn about the world.
A developmental delay meant she only had the mental age of an 11-yearold, but that didn’t stop Kimmie. She was a Special Olympics athlete, competing in the running races. She loved riding her bike, watching baseball and playing with her dogs, too.
Yet, all that came to an end on the afternoon of 17 August 2010.
At around 4pm, Kimmie’s father Cecil was expecting his daughter home. He rang her mobile, called her friends to ask about her whereabouts. Yet nobody knew where she was.
Kimmie had vanished…
Desperate search
Cecil called the police but – despite Kimmie’s impaired mental capacity
– because she was 16, detectives waited 24 hours before considering her a missing person.
For that first day, feeling helpless, her dad and family desperately searched alone.
‘We were crawling through bushes, crawl spaces, looking everywhere,’ Cecil said.
Finally, officers joined the search, but the teenager was still nowhere to be found.
Then a witness came forward to say he’d seen Kimmie walking with a young man called Tyler Savage on the afternoon she’d disappeared.
It seemed Tyler, then 18, was the last to see Kimmie.
When the police contacted him, Tyler said he’d been with Kimmie, but they’d parted ways in the afternoon.
He said he and Kimmie were acquaintances, not close pals.
They’d known each other for more than two years and were Facebook friends.
But, eventually, as officers pressed him further, Tyler’s story began to unravel.
He no longer denied knowing what’d happened to poor Kimmie. Instead, he made a shocking confession – he’d killed her.
Body found
A week after Kimmie’s disappearance, Tyler Savage led detectives to a row of blackberry bushes, just a mile from the girl’s home.
The officers found her half-naked body in the thicket. Her shirt and bra were tied around her neck.
Savage was arrested and charged with aggravated first-degree murder. He had no previous convictions, had never been arrested in all his 18 years.
And a neighbour of his – Jenny Berto, 35 – tearfully told journalists he was like a ‘family member’. Said he’d take her son to the shopping centre for pizza.
‘This is so unexpected. He’s so sweet, upbeat, funny, I trust him wholeheartedly,’ she said.
So what had happened between Tyler and Kimmie?
By the time his trial came around, Tyler Savage had changed his story once again.
Now, he said Kimmie’s death was an accident. That she’d asked him to choke her during a sex game, but it’d all gone terribly wrong.
Savage claimed he’d panicked, tried to make it look like she’d been raped, because he didn’t think anyone would believe the truth.
Due to this dramatic change of confession, the defence requested Savage’s charge be downgraded from firstdegree murder to seconddegree manslaughter.
But prosecutor Mark Lindquist insisted Kimmie’s death was no accident.
‘Savage admitted that he strangled Kimberly when she attempted to leave.
‘He also admitted to sexual contact with her. He told detectives that he carried Kimberly’s dead body toward a large thicket of blackberry bushes and brambles, dumped her body and threw her bicycle on top of her naked body.’
The court ruled the charge of murder would remain. Tyler pleaded not guilty and, in late 2013, the trial began.
Lindquist told the jury Savage had premeditated Kimmie’s murder – raped her and then strangled her to death to cover it up.
Savage’s taped confession was central to the prosecution case. Clips were played in which Savage broke down as he admitted strangling Kimmie before dumping her body.
‘He took her shirt and her bra and wrapped it around her neck and he tied it,’ deputy prosecuting lawyer Phil Sorenson said.
‘He murdered her and then he threw her away.’
Savage had told detectives he and Kimmie had arranged to meet through Facebook but, as they sat and talked, she’d decided to leave.
Thinking this was ‘lame’, Savage said he attacked.
‘She died and I threw her in the bushes, kind of afraid of what I did,’ he was recorded saying.
Tragic accident?
Prosecutors alleged Savage then went to a neighbour’s to play Dungeons & Dragons online, in order to ‘forget’ what had happened.
But the defence team reiterated Savage’s claim that Kimmie’s death was a result of a ‘tragic accident during consensual sex’.
Taking the stand, Savage told jurors he’d met with Kimmie and they’d had sex, but that he’d been hesitant when she’d asked him to choke her.
‘She kept on asking me and saying it was safe and she’d done it before,’ he said.
Only, their ‘sex game’ had gone wrong, he claimed.
Savage’s lawyer Leslie Tolzin told the court that Kimmie had a secret life she hid from her father.
He claimed Kimmie was secretly boy crazy.
After both sides made their closing arguments, it was time for the jury to decide who to believe.
Had the vulnerable teenage girl died as a result of a sex game with catastrophic consequences?
Or was the murder a premeditated and brutal act of violence?