Woman who poisoned her father convicted of murder

A woman who poisoned her father and buried his body in a crawl space of their Federal Heights home was convicted Monday of first-degree murder in Adams County.

Dayna Michele Jennings, 45, was also convicted of tampering with a human body in the death of her 69year-old father, William Mussack, according to the district attorney’s office.

Mussack’s body was found by investigators executing a search warrant on Jan. 10, 2018, at 10022 Eliot Circle, according to a news release. The body was buried in debris and a layer of concrete.

Earlier, Federal Heights police made repeated efforts to do a welfare check on Mussack because relatives were concerned that they couldn’t reach him in December 2017. Mussack had told his son that he slept for 15 hours after Jennings fed him and gave him a massage on Dec. 7, 2017.

Mussack, according to the news release, told his son: “I keep telling her she must have drugged me.”

An autopsy found that Mussack was poisoned by acepromazine, an animal tranquilizer.

“This is a substance that should never be in a human body,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Brett Martin told the jury, according to the news release. “It is a central nervous system depressant. It slows respiration until a person stops breathing and the heart stops beating, and that’s what happened to William Mussack.”

Mussack had been researching the effects of overdoses involving acepromazine shortly before he stopped communicating with relatives, the news release said. Later that month, Jennings rented two Dumpsters and purchased bags of concrete from Home Depot, all the while maxing out her father’s credit card.

“Eleven days after her father was poisoned and buried in the crawl space, she texted: ‘Life is so different now I feel so much better,’ ” Martin said.

Sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 19 in Adams County.