LITTLE ROCK — Saying that unanswered questions about the fatal attack on Anne Pressly have led to rumors, the stepfather of the slain KATV news anchor addressed on Monday some aspects of the case that investigators have not disclosed.
"It's just so out of place for a burglary gone bad to suffer those severe injuries," Guy Cannady said in a phone interview from New York's LaGuardia Airport on Monday evening. "But it's important that people know the facts."
The affidavit - released Monday - that was used to seek an arrest warrant for Curtis Lavelle Vance said that he voluntarily consented to a check of his DNA. When Little Rock detectives questioned him about the case early last week athis home in Marianna, the affidavit said, he denied that he was in Little Rock when Pressly was attacked.
Investigators used that DNA sample the next day to confirm that Vance was their suspect, matching it against DNA taken from Pressly's home in Little Rock's Heights neighborhood. Police arrested Vance on Wednesday night after police announced he was a suspect.
The affidavit, released five days after the arrest, offers little more new detail about the Oct. 20 assault, the injuries that killed Pressly five days later or the motive behind the attack. Authorities normally release an affidavit written in support of an arrest warrant immediately after police arrest a suspect.
Cannady, who thinks Pressly's attacker sexually assaultedher, bases that belief on the nature of the crime and his conversations with Little Rock police, he said.
Cannady considers the homicide and the robbery aspects of the case open to the public, he said, but he originally wanted the sexual assault to remain secret.
"Even with something this public, there's a part that's personal and private," he said. Yet he decided to knock down whatever rumors he could that made the attack sound worse than it was.
"There is a value to putting out the correct information about what we believe happened," he said.
Little Rock police spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings said the Little Rock Police Department would not comment on Cannady's statements, and he declined to confirm or deny whether Pressly's attacker assaulted her sexually.
"There's a lot of stuff out there," he said. "Now's not the time to get into those details."
The department has released as much information as it plans to until the case is adjudicated, he said.
The Vance affidavit can be read here.
"When it's all done, you can have everything we have," he said.
Pressly's mother, Patti Cannady, was the one who found her daughter beaten beyond recognition before the sun rose that Monday morning in October.
As she often did, Cannady had given her daughter a wake-up call that morning. When Pressly, 26, a morning television anchor for KATV, Channel 7, did not answer her phone, Cannady went to her rented house on Club Road. Pressly was unconscious when her mother found her, and she lingered at St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center for five days, much of the time in a medically induced coma, before she died.
She never spoke.
St. Vincent fired as many as six employees for improperly accessing her medical records. The FBI has asked questions of St. Vincent's employees relating to possible violations of privacy law.
Detectives had little luck early in their investigation, chasing scattered leads that only rarely offered good information. They were confident in the physical evidence that Pressly's attacker left behind, and they had DNA evidence, which initially matched nothing in the DNA database to give them a name.
Then last week, police got a hit. The DNA from Pressly's house matched the DNA of a nameless suspect in an April rape in Marianna, the Lee County seat, about 100 miles east of Little Rock.
Little Rock detectives called Marianna's sole detective, who gave them the name of a suspect on the basis of details of the Pressly case.
Little Rock detectives interviewed Vance on Tuesday and swabbed his cheek for a DNA sample, which he could have legally refused.
The DNA matched.
Police arrested Vance, who turned 28 two days after the attack, on Wednesday night in Little Rock and charged him with capital murder.
Pulaski County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley said he had not seen the police case file but knows "bits and pieces" that police have passed along. He has fewer than 60 days to set a hearing for Vance.
"We'll review the entire thing cover to cover and get that taken care of," Jegley said Monday. "We try to crank them through pretty quick when we get them."
Front Section, Pages 1, 7 on 12/02/2008