Little Rock police arrested a suspect in the brutal slaying of Little Rock news anchor Anne Pressly late Wednesday, about an hour after the police chief named a suspect in her death.
Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas told reporters at a 10 p.m. press conference that detectives had obtained a warrant charging 28-year-old Curtis Lavelle Vance with capital murder in Pressly's slaying.
By 11:30 p.m., officers, acting on a tip, arrested Vance at a house near 24th and Cross streets in Little Rock, police spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings said.
Vance was being questioned by detectives early this morning.
"We got a tip. We went there and he's in custody," Hastings said early Thursday. "As far as we know he wasn't armed."
Hastings said Vance knew officers had been seeking him. Thomas said prior to the arrest that Vance was believed armed with a 9mm pistol and "a lot of extra ammunition."
Vance's driver's license lists a Marianna address, but he has relatives in Little Rock and North Little Rock, Thomas said.
"At 1 p.m., we believe Mr. Vance left that [Marianna] address in the company of a female and three small children," Thomas said. "He is most assuredly dangerous."
The chief didn't disclose how Vance was tied to Pressly's murder but did say that the evidence was convincing.
"This is a very solid case," he said. "We are going to get him."
Vance is about 6 feet tall and weighs about 240 pounds, police said. He had last been seen in a dark-colored 1998 Oldsmobile Aurora with temporary paper tags and 22-inch rims.
He was traveling with a woman named Sheanika Cooper and three children all under the age of 6, Thomas said. He was believed to be armed with a 9mm handgun.
He has no criminal history with the Little Rock Police Department, and the only contact he has had with the department is for traffic violations, police said.
A $50,000 reward is offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.
A flier with the suspect's photograph was handed out at the news conference. Pressly's stepfather, Guy Canady, intently studied Vance's face.
"It's a tough thing to see this face, and it's very difficult to look at his picture, just knowing that's the face she saw in her last moments," Canady said.
http://focus.arkans…">http://focus.arkans…">Pressly press conference
"We're very thankful for the hard work, but the work is not done yet," he said. "The next aspect is getting him in custody."
Canady said he and his wife appreciated the Police Department's hard work.
"We knew this day would come," he said. "We didn't know when it would come, but we knew it would come."
He said before the arrest that he and his wife are "cautiously optimistic that Vance will be arrested "in a short time."
Canady said officers were "incredibly dedicated" to the case. "We understand why it was important that they not release information on the case," Canady said. "A lack of information didn't indicate a lack of effort on their part."
Police said that on the morning of Oct. 20, Pressly's mother, Patricia Canady of Pawleys Island, S.C., was visiting Little Rock and had called her daughter to wake her up. When Pressly didn't answer, her mother went to her home, a small white-frame house at 4910 Club Road in the Heights neighborhood of Little Rock.
Canady found her daughter in bed, bleeding from the head and almost unrecognizable from a severe beating.
Canady called 911 at 4:33 a.m. Police found no immediate signs of forced entry at the house. Someone had let her two cocker spaniels out of the house and had taken her purse. Pressly lived alone.
Pressly was taken to St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center, where she underwent surgery.
Police later said her injuries were the result of blunt-force trauma. Pressly died on Oct. 25.
St. Vincent Health System fired as many as six employees last month for improperly accessing Pressly's medical files while she was a patient at the company's main Little Rock hospital.
A routine patient-privacy audit conducted by the hospital showed that as many as eight people had accessed those records improperly.
According to Pressly's biography on the KATV, Channel 7, Web site, she was born in South Carolina and moved with her family to Little Rock while she was in high school. She went to Rhodes College in Memphis and began working part time for KATV during her sophomore year. She eventually was hired full time after she graduated in 2004.
She had a bit part in the soap opera As The World Turns, playing a sorority girl, and more recently had a small part in Oliver Stone's latest movie W.
Information for this article was contributed by Jacob Quinn Sanders and Andy Davis of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Associate Press.