Killer-turned-baby sitter admits to sexual acts with child, says she took advantage of him, affidavit says

Clifford Eugene Cox, a convicted killer once sentenced to life in prison, told investigators that he had sex with a girl he was baby-sitting, but he said the 8-year-old girl took advantage of him, an affidavit says.

Cox, 56, pleaded guilty in 1984 to strangling Cathryn Kessinger, 23, of Winfield, with a rope. He was sentenced to life but was let out of prison on parole in 2006, according to Kansas Department of Corrections records.

In August, he was arrested and charged with child rape, criminal sodomy and aggravated indecencies with a child, Sedgwick County Court records show. The alleged crimes happened in Wichita for two years while he baby-sat a girl, from the time she was 6 to when she was 8.

The probable cause affidavit in Cox’s case, which was made public Tuesday and provides the police department’s reasoning for arresting him, provides new information about the severity and frequency of the alleged sexual abuse and how embarrassment kept it from being reported. It also says on the day he was arrested he admitted to some of the alleged crimes to a KBI investigator.

On Aug. 3, a Wichita police detective with the Exploited and Missing Child Unit questioned Cox. He told the detective that he baby-sat the girl and her siblings for two or three years on weekends and during the week when they were out of school and that he would take the girl into his bedroom to have private talks, but never did anything sexual with her. He said he accidentally touched her genitals once on the outside of her clothes while they were wrestling, but it wasn’t intentional.

He told the Wichita detective that the girl was “flirtatious with him and the other boys in the home so he would take her to the bedroom to talk about her behavior so she didn’t get embarrassed,” according to the affidavit.

But a couple weeks later, on the day Cox was arrested, he told a KBI investigator a different story.

When he was wrestling with the kids, he reached in the girl’s pants while he was picking her up and he fondled her, he said.

Cox told the investigator that the 8-year-old girl “is sexually aggressive and took advantage of him.” He said that happened four different times, and that at least once he had sex with her.

The girl told investigators a different story.

She said that shortly after Cox began baby-sitting her, he began doing sexual things to her. He would take her into his bedroom and shut the door. Once inside, he would make her undress and get on the bed.

When Cox would lead her by the hand to his bedroom, where they would stay for about an hour at a time, the other kids would be in the living room watching TV or outside playing, her brother told investigators.

Her brother, who was also being baby-sat by Cox, would go to the door and try to hear what was going on inside the bedroom, but he said the TV in the bedroom was always on so he couldn’t hear anything.

During the two years that Cox watched the girl, she told police that he performed sexual acts with her every time she was at his house, from the time she was 6 years old until she stopped going to his house in June.

How it started

After the girl didn’t have to see Cox anymore she told someone what had happened.

The girl’s mother told investigators that she met Cox through an acquaintance at work. She started leaving them with Cox when she went to work. The mother would leave them with Cox every other weekend from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. during the school year and every other week during the summer starting in 2016, according to the affidavit.

The mother quit leaving her kids with Cox on June 13 because she could no longer afford to pay him, she told an investigator.

That’s about the time when the girl told her brother that Cox “had been a pervert to her.”

The boy told their mother his sister had something to tell her. The girl disclosed the sexual abuse to her mother.

She told her mother that she didn’t tell anyone for two years because she was embarrassed, the mother told investigators.

The mother did not tell the girl’s father, who had primary custody. He found out through a Facebook message from the children’s maternal aunt, he said in a previous interview with The Eagle.

The aunt said the girl’s mother didn’t report the crime to police because she was “afraid she would be in trouble for sending the kids to him (Cox) for child care,” according to the affidavit.

On July 1, the father reported that his daughter had been sexually abused by her former baby sitter.

The father said in August that he doesn’t want people to blame the girl’s mother, and he said he does not hold it against her. He said they did not know about Cox’s criminal past because he gave them a fake name.

“She feels completely betrayed, ashamed and guilty,” he said. “She thought she knew (Cox’s) family and she feels more guilty than anyone. She didn’t know his real name either.”

Cox’s next court appearance is a criminal preliminary hearing on Oct. 4.

This story was originally published September 19, 2018 at 3:29 PM.