Man accused of dismembering dead wife in front of kids charged in Calif. killing

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A man who was arrested after sleeping in a Kansas storage unit with his two children and his dismembered wife's remains has been charged in a California killing.

The Desert Sun reports that Justin Rey was charged Wednesday with murder in the death of Sean Ty Ferel. The Palm Springs, California, man disappeared in May 2016 after vacationing with Rey. Three months later, Rey crashed Ferel's vehicle in Los Angeles. Ferel's body hasn't been found, but his blood was in the trunk, and his belongings were found in an Arizona storage unit that Rey had rented.

Rey allegedly used Ferel's credit cards, cash, personal financial information and car "for his own benefit" after the killing, according to the murder charges obtained by CBS affiliate KCTV.

Rey is jailed on $1 million bond in Kansas on child endangerment charges. He's also charged with abandonment of corpse in Missouri, where his wife died in a hotel in October apparently after giving birth in a bathtub. Rey, his then-pregnant wife, Jessica Monteiro Rey, and their two-year-old daughter checked in to the Kansas City hotel in September and were staying there for several weeks before the woman's death.

Missouri and Kansas court records don't say how she died, and Rey provided conflicting information. Rey said that his wife committed suicide after giving birth and also that she died during or after childbirth, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by the Kansas City Star.

After the woman's death, he said he placed her body on the bed and took pictures of himself and the children with her body, the paper reports. He said he stayed with the newborn and toddler in the room for two more days before he moved her back to the bathtub, where he allegedly dismembered her body with the children present.

Rey put some of her body parts in a large cooler, a Kansas City police detective wrote in the probable cause statement. He used a stove to boil parts that wouldn't fit in the cooler and flushed some of remains down the toilet, the statement says.

Hotel management said Rey tried to disguise his voice as a woman's when he called the front desk to check out on Oct. 23, the statement says. Surveillance video footage shows him pulling a red cooler with a black bag on top through the hotel, while pushing a stroller with a toddler walking beside him.

Police found the remains on Oct. 24 inside a cooler and tote at a U-Haul Moving and Storage facility in nearby Lenexa, Kansas, after Rey slept there with the children. Emergency responders checked on the children, who were later taken to a hospital. The affidavit says the baby wasn't wearing adequate clothing and had an eye infection.

After Rey was arrested and put in a police vehicle, he was asked about his wife's whereabouts. He responded that she had died several days earlier and was in the cooler and one of the totes, which he had been trying to remove from the storage unit, according to the Kansas court records.

During a court appearance earlier this month, Rey was removed after a screaming rant against authorities. The Kansas City Star reports an irate Rey yelled that Johnson County authorities were trying to take his children after his wife killed herself. A judge ordered him removed from the courtroom, saying, "That's enough."

"I don't care if it's enough because I have my children out there," Rey said, according to KCTV. "Their mother just killed herself, and you guys are going to kidnap my children, our children."

His attorney didn't return a phone message from the AP seeking comment on the latest charges in California.