WESTON — Ralph Lunsford returned home from work on Sept. 24, 2011, jarred by the news his 3-year-old stepdaughter, Aliayah, had disappeared.
Then he noticed fresh dirt on the family van being driven by his wife, and when he tried to question his two biological daughters about what transpired, he recalled “it was like they were programmed or something.”
Prosecutors believe his testimony Wednesday supports their charge that Lena Lunsford buried the toddler in a rural area and enlisted her other daughters — then ages 9 and 11 — in the cover-up.
Aliayah, now presumed dead six years later, has never been located as her mother stands trial in Lewis County.
Ralph Lunsford recalled the exterior of the van being clean the previous night, yet as Lena claimed to be searching the neighborhood for Aliayah, there was “a lot more dirt than what should have been there.”
Defense attorneys tried to puncture Ralph Lunsford’s credibility by citing a spate of domestic abuse arrests, and during cross-examination he had trouble recalling the year he and Lena married and divorced. Yet his voice quivered upon recalling Lena’s refusal to discuss the circumstances of the child’s vanishing that 2011 morning. He also noted that Aliayah’s sisters — referred to as D.C. and K.C. in court proceedings because they remain minors — were strangely expressionless.
“To look at ‘em, nothing seemed to be wrong,” Ralph Lunsford said. “No crying, no nothing.”
Several hours after Lena Lunsford claims Aliayah went missing, police finally were summoned to their Bendale home. By then, Ralph Lunsford noticed that drug paraphernalia — such as marijuana pipes and “a straw to snort your bath salts” — had been cleaned up.
Earlier Wednesday, as prosecutors moved into a third day of building a case, they re-played for jurors an informal interview — conducted inside a hotel room within a week of the disappearance — when Lena Lunsford met with a female state trooper from the Crimes Against Children Unit.
“I love that little girl. I want her home,” the mother said on the recording. “You would not believe some of the what-ifs that have been put in my head.”
Maybe she opened the door to a stranger, Lena Lunsford suggested, adding, “A kid don’t just disappear.”
The trooper, Sgt. T.M. Divita, advised Lunsford that parents sometimes accidentally injure their children and panic, to which Lunsford replied:
“I did not do anything intentionally or unintentionally to my child. I have no idea where she is, and that’s why I’m trying to make sense of this. … She’s obviously been taken somewhere. If I knew where she was at, I would go get her myself.”
By Lunsford’s account, on the morning of Sept. 24, 2011, she awoke to find her youngest daughter missing from her bed. Presuming Aliayah “was crawling around the house,” Lunsford said she became more alarmed after checking closets and cabinets and peeking beneath beds — all of which turned up nothing.
Asked why she didn’t phone police immediately, Lunsford said she still presumed Aliayah was in the vicinity. “It wasn’t even in my imagination that she was missing. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t find her.”
Lunsford said she and Aliayah’s older sisters struck out in the family van expecting to find the child nearby. Only after running out of gas a few miles away, and borrowing a fuel canister from a resident to restart the van, did the mother claim to realize “something was bad wrong.”
Divita, now a 15-year law enforcement veteran, recalled Lena Lunsford fixating on the small-town gossip that surrounded the disappearance, “as if her interest was in what the community thought of her more than her daughter being missing.”
Lunsford sounded frustrated about the “trash talk” and inaccuracies she read on social media.
“The real story is, she was in her bed and then she wasn’t,” Lunsford said on the recording. “Somebody saw something, somebody knows something, and those are the people who need to be talking.”
Divita said her agency determined that sending a female interviewer might be less intimidating. The trooper, while noting Lunsford’s pregnancy at the time, said the woman spent most of the conversation lying on the hotel room bed and showing “no sense of urgency.”
In other audio segments, Lunsford reminisces about Aliayah being soft-hearted with a pouty expression that could get her “anything she wants.” The moments of splashing in mud puddles and playing with toy trucks mixed with Aliayah reverting to a “prissy little girl.”
Three FBI special agents also testified Wednesday morning, among them Chris Farrell, who worked in the Clarksburg office in 2011.
He recounted a separate interview, one that intensified when investigators flagged “lots of inconsistencies” in Lena Lunsford’s story.
At one point when she turned silent, Farrell thought she was on the verge of confessing and his interrogation became more pressurized.
