Guilty verdict for sex offender who abducted 8-year-old girl playing at Wichita motel
A Sedgwick County jury last week convicted a registered sex offender of abducting and trying to molest an 8-year-old girl playing a daytime game of hide-and-seek with her young cousin outside of a west Wichita motel three years ago.
Daniel Alden Withrow, 43, will be sentenced July 12 by District Judge Christopher Magana. Jurors on Friday morning found him guilty of one count of kidnapping and one count of attempted aggravated indecent liberties with a child after deliberating for a few hours, according to court records and Dan Dillon, a spokesman for the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office. His trial started on May 16.
Wichita police arrested Withrow on May 5, 2019, after he pulled the girl into a storage shed, put his hand up her shirt and tried to pull down her pants around noon that same day, an arrest affidavit released in the case says. Withrow saw and approached the girl and her cousin while he was mowing a cemetery next to the White Glove Inn, 11430 W. Kellogg, where the girl had been living with her mother.
In a police interview summarized in the affidavit, Withrow denied abducting and touching the girl sexually, claiming instead that he saw the children when he stopped to urinate in a treeline. He told authorities he waved and told the children to split up when hiding. He then put his hand over the girl’s mouth to stifle her screams after he became scared she might tell someone she’d seen him urinating in public.
The girl got away because she screamed and scared him off. Police have said Withrow was a stranger; neither the girl nor her family knew him.
Withrow was employed as a lawn maintenance care subcontractor for a nearby business and was in the area for work when he kidnapped the girl, police have said. He was required to register as a sex offender following a conviction in a 1999 Reno County aggravated indecent liberties with a child case.
He remained in the Sedgwick County Jail on Monday.
