ST. LOUIS -- By Friday, Jan. 12, the kidnapping of 13-year-old William "Ben" Ownby was starting to fade as a big news story.

The boy had been gone for four days, and conventional wisdom held that he was probably not alive. Local and national reporters started packing up to head home for the weekend as freezing rain descended on the rural eastern Missouri town of Beaufort.

Then Franklin County Sheriff Gary Toelke emerged from his office for a late-afternoon news conference. The usually stoic man had a gleam in his eye as he approached the bank of microphones.

Toelke had stunning news: Authorities found Ben alive. More stunning: He was with Shawn Hornbeck, a 15-year-old boy who had disappeared more than four years earlier.

The discovery was soon dubbed the "Missouri Miracle" and became a story that gained international attention. Legal filings and court hearings throughout the year painted a disturbing picture of the suspect, Michael Devlin, now 42, who eventually pleaded guilty to kidnapping and abusing both boys.

That topped Missouri news during a year that included tragedy and the trial of a woman who killed an expectant mother and cut the baby from her womb.

Devlin pleaded guilty in October to dozens of state and federal charges of kidnapping, forcible sodomy and producing child pornography. He received multiple life sentences on the state charges and 170 years on the federal charges.

While it is The Associated Press' policy not to identify suspected victims of sexual abuse in most cases, the story of Shawn and Ben has been widely publicized and their names are well known.

A rejected defense

In October, federal jurors rejected defense claims of mental illness and convicted Lisa Montgomery, 39, of kidnapping resulting in death in the Dec. 16, 2004, attack on 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore. Montgomery showed Stinnett's baby off as her own before she was arrested the next day at her Melvern, Kan., farmhouse.

Jurors also decided the crime warranted the death penalty, which U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner said he would be obliged to impose when she is formally sentenced. No date has been set.

Neosho church shootings

The town of Neosho was rocked in August by a tragedy that captured national headlines when a man opened fire inside a church during Sunday services. The killer and the victims were part of a tightly knit community of Micronesian immigrants.

Police said Eiken Elam Saimon entered the church with two handguns, killing three men and wounding four others. As he approached the congregation of roughly 50 fellow immigrants, witnesses said, he cursed the men as liars and accused them of attacking his reputation behind his back.

It appears Saimon was enraged over his poor standing in the community, which was in jeopardy even before the shooting. A 14-year-old female relative told police just hours earlier that Saimon had sexually assaulted her.

Saimon remains in prison on first-degree murder charges.

Kansas City killings

In Kansas City in May, 51-year-old David W. Logsdon killed two strangers in the parking lot of Ward Parkway Center before police shot him to death in the mall. Seven other people were injured.

Logsdon also was suspected in the beating death of his 67-year-old next-door neighbor, Patricia Ann Reed, a few days before the mall shootings. According to Police, Logsdon also shot and wounded an officer who had stopped Logsdon while using Reed's car hours before the mall shootings.

More missing children

The search for missing Independence siblings Sam and Lindsey Porter ended in September when their father, Dan Porter, led authorities to the children's remains.

Porter, already serving time for kidnapping the children in June 2004, now faces two counts of first-degree murder. A state appeals court, meanwhile, overturned his convictions on two counts of kidnapping with intent to terrorize his ex-wife, Tina Porter, while upholding his convictions on two counts of parental kidnapping.

Across the state in St. Charles County, the parents of 13-year-old Megan Meier revealed that she took her own life after being bullied on MySpace.

Tina Meier said her daughter was taunted by "Josh," a fictional character created by a neighbor and two teenage girls. A local prosecutor said no charges would be filed in the case because creating the fake account did not violate state stalking laws.

Tina Meier is pushing for new laws to ban Internet harassment and a state task force is drafting a bill it hopes to pass next year.

In Jefferson City, interest groups got an early start on the 2008 campaign by filing potential ballot proposals limiting stem-cell research, affirmative action and abortion.

Gov. Matt Blunt and Attorney General Jay Nixon repeatedly took political potshots at each other, and both were hit by scandals.

After initially defending the practice, Nixon agreed to reimburse the state for taking his attorney general's car and staff on political trips. Although Missouri law prohibits using state vehicles for private purposes, Nixon had claimed it was justified for security reasons because he is always on official duty -- even when campaigning.

Blunt's office was rocked over its acknowledged deletion of some government e-mails, a practice it defended and noted also occurs in other government offices. Former governor's office attorney Scott Eckersley claimed he was fired after advising Blunt's office that e-mails could be considered public records.

Blunt's administration denied that assertion and responded by publicly criticizing Eckersley's character. Blunt ended up replacing his chief of staff, Ed Martin, who had been at the center of the e-mail controversy and Eckersley's firing.