On December 22, 2009, an 11-year-old girl disappeared from her Wicomico County, Maryland home in the middle of the night. Her body was discovered on Christmas day after a massive search.
Christmas will be the tragic reminder when Sarah Haley Foxwell tragically disappeared, according to Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis: “This was the most difficult case in my 35 years of law enforcement.”
"We knew immediately that this was not a parental kidnapping," Lewis said. "We knew this was a kidnapping in the middle of the night of a little girl from her bedroom wearing pajamas. And we knew we had to work quickly to try to locate her, if we were going to find her alive."
Police got an early break in the case from the 6-year-old sister, Emma, Thomas Legs, who dated Sarah's aunt, and the girls knew him as “Mr. Tommy.”
"We knew early on that Thomas Leggs was our suspect because the 6-year-old sister Emma was in the bedroom with her," Lewis said. "She was awakened to the suspect Thomas Leggs who was in the bedroom. She was familiar to him."
A briefing of Leggs' information detailed Leggs' criminal history.
"We immediately queried him in our system and found out he was a registered sex offender in both Maryland and Delaware," Lewis said. "Within hours we had deputies knocking on his door in eastern Wicomico County. He lived just a couple of miles from her home."
When questioned by law enforcement, Leggs denied involvement and a race-against-the-clock ensued to find Sarah across the region and the country.
"We had individuals here from the Dakotas who had come in," Lewis said. "Mantrackers with special dogs were brought in to try to track down little Sarah. We never gave up hope. We were very hopeful that we would find her."
Thousands of citizens turned up on the cold, gray Christmas day to aid in te search of the 11-year-old girl.
"The citizens in this county pulled together like none of us had seen in the past," Lewis said.
But cellphone data from Leggs' phone narrowed the search when Sarah's body was found by a Maryland State Police trooper in the wooded area east of Delmar in the afternoon on Christmas day. Raped and brutally murdered, Leggs still denied any involvement in the girl's disappearance.
"Thomas Leggs and his defense team were presented with DNA results that we had recovered from little Sarah linking the suspect exclusively to the crime and it was then, and only then, did he admit his guilt," Lewis said. "Up until then he had proclaimed his innocence the entire time."
Lewis didn't hold back on what punishment he believed Leggs had coming.
"I said back then and I'll say it again: if there was ever anyone who deserved the death penalty, it was Thomas Leggs," Lewis said. "I screamed the death penalty back in 2009. But Maryland had already placed a moratorium on the death penalty and our governor had said he disagreed with administering the death penalty in the state of Maryland."
In the end, Leggs was given two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. Maryland Department of Corrections has not revealed where Leggs is serving time.
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