Michigan Pastor Gets 56 Years For Murder Of Fiancee's Daughter

In a tragic and bizarre murder case, a small town Michigan pastor has been found guilty of murdering his fiancee's 24-year-old daughter. His reason? He wanted to fulfill his fantasy of having sex with a dead body.

The pastor, 55-year-old John D. White, was engaged to Sally Gay, Rebekah Gay's mother, and routinely watched over Rebekah's 3-year-old son. She and White lived in the same trailer park in Broomfield Township, 85 miles northwest of Lansing, MI.

On the day of the killing, White drank several beers before going to Rebekah Gay's mobile home, where he repeatedly struck her in the head with a mallet and then strangled her to death with a zip tie. White then undressed the body, dumped it the nearby woods, and proceeded to dress her son up in his Halloween costume and take him to go see his father.

"For 20 excruciating hours we prayed that Rebekah" would come home, her mother told White in court Thursday. "She was not yours to take. How dare you."

This was not White's first run-in with the law. In 1981 he was put on probation for choking and stabbing a 17-year-old Battle Creek girl, and spent 12 years in prison for the manslaughter death of a 26-year-old woman. He was released in 2007.

"He kept saying he's a bad person, he's a pastor, he felt bad for the people in his church. ... I don't recall him bring real remorseful at all with regard to the victim or anything else," Isabella County Sheriff Leo Mioduszewski told The Associated Press.

White was a pastor for Christ Community Fellowship, a small church north of Detroit with a following of only 14 people. Those responsible for hiring him said that they were aware of his history before they appointed him leader of their church.

"He was absolutely contrite," Christ Community Fellowship church elder Donna Houghton said. "All kinds of people turn around and meet the Lord and they are a different person. He was doing a lot of good in the community. ... He was doing a lot of good and Satan did not want him doing good and Satan got to him."

White confessed to killing Gay to fulfill a necrophilia fantasy of his, though it is uncertain if he had sex with the body or not. Last month he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder as a habitual third offender, and has since been sentenced to 56-85 years behind bars.