News & Tech

Doris Phillips the 81-year old aunt of NBC newsman Stone Phillips was found murdered. A man named Miguel Arciba has been charged in her slaying. Police say that Phillips disappeared from her Reagor Springs home on July 26.

They believe she was kidnapped and then murdered.

Police believe she was killed over several items of property that she owned, and Arciba who, as a teenager, lived on her Ellis County farm was charged Monday with aggravated robbery and kidnapping in her death, investigators said.

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The Associated Press reports that a dispute over several items owned by Phillips is believed to be a possible motive in the slaying, officials said. Arciba later led authorities Friday to an abandoned farmhouse near the town of Bardwell, where they found Phillips' body.

Arciba told investigators that he knew of her whereabouts through an "accomplice," but knows nothing of her disappearance or death.

In the weeks before her death, Phillips told several neighbors about "these guys [who] were harassing her about buying her old farm equipment," said Terry Frantz, a neighbor who learned of the account from one of the victim's other friends.

"She told them emphatically, 'No,'" Frantz said.

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Lt. Clint Tims of the Ellis County Sheriff’s Department told the Star-Telegram that the case was given top priority, not because of Phillips' relationship to a national television personality, but because an "81-year-old woman should have felt secure in her own home."

--Jeff Freeland writes from Texas