Michael Hendricks, right top inset, and Maggie Ybarra, right bottom inset, were sentenced for the murder of Kensie Aubry, left inset. (Aubry’s photo and crime scene screenshot from CBS Kansas City, Missouri, affiliate KCTV5 News/YouTube; Hendricks and Ybarra mugshots from Jackson County)
A couple will spend the rest of their lives in prison for killing the woman’s friend to fulfill his sex horror fantasy before he dismembered her body with a chainsaw and buried the remains on a property in Missouri.
Michael Hendricks, 42, and Maggie Ybarra, 32, were sentenced for the murder of Kensie Aubry, 32. Hendricks was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole plus 44 1/2 more years, while Ybarra was sentenced to life in prison plus 56 1/2 years. In August 2021, a Jackson County grand jury indicted Hendricks and Ybarra on multiple charges. The pair were found guilty in July.
Jean Peters Baker, the Jackson County Prosecutor, praised the work of investigators and a brave young victim who led law enforcement to the defendants. The defendants also each faced separate charges related to that case.
“My office spent countless hours to assure justice in this case of frankly unspeakable human behavior,” said Baker. “We sought the max under the law. I must also praise law enforcement, notably the Grandview Police Department, for believing and acting on the word of this young victim. Justice could not have been served without her bravery and her sense of right and wrong. She ultimately delivered this just ruling.”
The victim’s mother told Kansas City FOX affiliate WDAF-TV that justice was served.
“I miss just her love, her hugs, her happiness that she has in her heart,” she said. “My daughter was a very sweet person. She would have done anything for anybody.”
In court, Ybarra read from a statement stating she was accountable and apologized to the child victim, saying Hendricks manipulated her, WDAF-TV reported.
The girl came forward to report Hendricks to authorities for allegedly touching her vagina over her clothes and trying to entice her to have group sex with him and Ybarra. Her information eventually led investigators to the property near Grain Valley, outside Kansas City, where Aubry’s mutilated corpse was discovered.
According to the witness, Hendricks and Ybarra boasted of their violence against Aubry and provided photographic proof.
“Maggie showed her photographs on a cellphone of a female with her hands tied, naked and gagged,” an Independence Police detective wrote in court papers obtained by local ABC affiliate KMBC.
That macabre show of trust was the likely result of a prior relationship. Ybarra served as the foster mother of the alleged sex crime victim several years prior – though the defendant was reportedly relieved of her status as the child’s guardian after allegedly allowing multiple sexual partners to abuse the girl when she was younger.
According to the girl — who found her way back to her onetime state-sanctioned custodian — Hendricks, Ybarra and Aubry “were all sleeping together, and Ybarra said that Hendricks ‘choked [Aubry] to death’ and put her in the freezer.”
That method of death tracked with previous statements Hendricks had allegedly made in the girl’s presence. According to police, the defendant said, “It turned him on when people die,” while all three (Hendricks, Ybarra and the unnamed girl) watched a horror movie. After that movie, the girl told law enforcement she was asked to have sex with the couple, and Hendricks went on to molest her.
“Our community owes greatly a child victim in this case who came forward and alerted police of the gruesome criminal activity detailed in these charges,” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in a news release then. “Without her bravery, we might not know today Kensie Aubry’s fate.”
The child victim told authorities that Hendricks admitted to cutting Aubry’s body into pieces with a chainsaw to dispose of the woman’s remains.
Aubry’s mother told local NBC affiliate KSHB that if she had known her daughter had been struggling on the streets of Missouri after leaving her home in Texas, she would have come immediately.
“If I’d have known how bad off she was, I might have been here quicker and maybe could have saved and taken her home,” she said, carrying her daughter’s ashes in a bag. “This is just her remains, ’cause her soul and her heart and everything is in heaven.”
Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report.
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