Supreme Court Denies Appeal by Missing Girl's Convicted Killer

The Florida Supreme Court rejected an appeal this week by convicted murderer Willie Seth Crain Jr.

Crain, sentenced to death for the 1998 kidnapping and murder of 7-year-old Amanda Brown, argued that his attorneys were ineffective because they stipulated that DNA matching Amandas DNA was derived from blood -- as opposed to some other source -- and failed to call an expert to challenge the states scratch-marks expert.

Crain has denied he killed the Hillsborough County girl whose body has never been found.

The state's top court backed the trial court ruling, declaring in an order released Thursday that "sufficient evidence existed that Crain killed Amanda in the course of a kidnapping with the intent to inflict bodily harm."

Prosecutors claimed Crain, a fisherman and crabber at the time of the girl's disappearance, took the girl first to his trailer after drugging her mother.

Crain had been introduced to the girl's mother at a bar three nights before Amanda was reported missing, prosecutors said.