Fravel on Trial, Day 12: Court shown recovery footage of Madeline Kingsbury’s body
(ABC 6 News) — Adam Fravel’s murder trial continued on Tuesday. Fravel is facing four murder charges in the death of Madelin Kingsbury, the mother of his children.
On Tuesday, a key witness was the investigator who found Kingsbury and told the courtroom about the moment that came after a two-month long search.
Thousands focused their searches around Highway 43 where police say Fravel drove the day Kingsbury went missing.
In June, that is where Kingsbury’s body was found in a culvert on a maintenance road off the highway. The investigator testified he was alerted to the body after hearing flies.
Body camera footage of the gruesome discovery was shown to the court in which Kingsbury was seen wrapped in a grey fitted bed sheet under several logs and overgrowth. Anyone, including jurors, could leave if they wished to.
The road, 198th Street, was actually searched several times before, but the investigator told the court that law enforcement had no knowledge this culvert existed. The area also looked much different than it had months earlier.
The fact that this road was searched several times is a point that Fravel’s defense team is focusing on.
Fravel’s defense attorneys continued to allude to bad police work in this case, and they claim the search should have ended much earlier seeing as the road was searched four separate times.
However, according to the investigator who found Kingsbury, the search was focused on other parts of the property and that investigators only drove 198th Street without getting out on foot.
Fravel’s team is questioning why police didn’t know there was a culvert under the road, and why she wasn’t found when there wasn’t overgrowth back in April.
The defense needs to convince the jury that this investigation is not open and shut while casting reasonable doubt on the prosecutor’s version of events.
ABC 6 News will be in Mankato for the duration of the trial, and full coverage can be found here.