Karen Santillan Tait was a woman found dead in Greenbrier State Forest in 2002.
Her husband plead guilty to her murder in 2013.
Case[]
Karen, originally from the Philippines, married Thomas Tait in 1998 after meeting him the previous year. The pair lived in Waynesboro, Virginia, where they had a child together.
Karen's badly decomposed remains were found over an embankment in Greenbrier State Forest in September 2002. An autopsy showed that there were no signs of trauma to the remains.
In 2011, a criminal complaint was filed against Thomas Tait after an elementary school student stepped forward during a child abuse prevention program. Whether this was Tait's child was not specified. The subsequent investigation found that Thomas has a large amount of child pornography on his computer. The investigation also revealed that Thomas once had a wife, who he claimed left him in 2002. However, Karen's family claimed that they had not had any contact with her since 2002, which led to a missing person report. DNA collected from family eventually matched the body found in West Virginia ten years earlier, with the identification being confirmed in October of 2012.
In February 2013, Thomas plead guilty to second-degree murder in Karen's death, as well as 20 counts of child pornography. Karen's body was eventually cremated and returned to her family in the Philippines.
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