Police arrested the husband of a missing woman on Wednesday after her body was discovered along the shoreline of Lake Lewisville two days before.
Karlton Dudley, husband of 32-year-old Sarah Dudley, was arrested Wednesday and charged with abuse of a corpse, a charge generally associated with unlawful disposal of a body.
Police in The Colony said they received a call around 7:28 p.m. on June 26 regarding a dead body that washed ashore near a camping site in Hidden Cove Park, reported WFAA.
According to the Plano Star Courier, the body was identified as Sarah Dudley. She was reported missing by her husband on June 24 around 11 p.m. after being last seen in the 7000 block of Bishop Road.
She chose to walk to work that day in an attempt to “clear her head,” her husband said, according to WFAA.
The Colony Police Department is investigating, and the Tarrant County Medical Examiner has not yet determined a precise cause of death.
Karlton claimed he last saw his wife on Saturday morning before he left to care for a friend’s cat. He claimed he got home shortly after 4 p.m., when Sarah would have been at work. He then said he chose to kayak at Hidden Cove Marina by Lake Lewisville around 5 p.m., per NBC 5.
His arrest affidavit claims Karlton told investigators that he didn’t end up getting into the lake because his kayak wouldn’t inflate, so he walked around before leaving a couple of hours later.
According to WFAA, Karlton was also charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child in a separate case out of Frisco. Because of this, he was wearing an ankle monitor at the time due to a condition of his probation, which helped investigators determine whether his story was accurate.
Location data reportedly showed him near where Sarah’s body was found.
“They were able to pull the data off the monitor and it placed him at the lake as he was saying around the same time frame that he was at, but it actually puts him into the water. Not just on the shore,” Minton said, per NBC 5. “Based on the totality of all of those circumstances and everything and where the body was found and where the GPS put him at, they were able to obtain a warrant for his arrest.”
Karlton is being held on bonds worth $560,000 in total for felony charges of abuse of a corpse and aggravated sexual assault of a child, according to reports from NBC 5.
Anyone with information regarding the case is asked to contact Detective James Barfield at [email protected].
Violent crime has been a serious problem in the metroplex, especially in Dallas, where murders were up more than 20% year over year during the first four months of 2023.
Relatedly, the Dallas Police Department is suffering a significant shortage of officers and is hundreds shy of the number needed to sufficiently manage crime in the city, as reported in The Dallas Express.
Crime is particularly frequent in Downtown Dallas, where there is no dedicated police unit like in Deep Ellum or downtown Fort Worth, which also uses such a unit alongside private security guards to keep crime down.