agreed. When Gardner asked Mercer if he would need help, Mercer refused and claimed that he knew of a good location to hide the body where it would never be found. Gardner and Gee left the house while Mercer advanced upstairs, where he manually strangled Keeton to death. At one point, Mercer called for Campbell and asked Campbell to take Keeton's pulse, and when Campbell detected a faint pulse, Mercer began striking Keeton's head and body while he continued to strangle her. Campbell again checked for a pulse and found none, at which point Mercer removed Keeton's body from his bed. He ordered Campbell to clean the crime scene and placed his sheets and blanket in his washing machine. Afterwards, Mercer and Campbell loaded Keeton's body into Mercer's pickup truck. Campbell drove the truck while Mercer directed him on where to go until they reached a desolate field, where Mercer dumped the body over a fence. When Mercer returned to the truck, he told Campbell that he wished he had murdered a 17-year-old girl who he had also raped earlier, stating that if he had, "I wouldn't have been on any rape charges and things I'm on right now." At the time of Keeton's murder, Mercer had a rape charge pending against him that the 17-year-old victim filed against him. When the two returned to Mercer's house, Campbell hid Mercer's shotgun, while Mercer burned Keeton's purse. Sometime between then and late September 1978, John Campbell acquired an attorney, who helped him to locate Keeton's body. Three to four weeks after the murder, Campbell and his attorney found Keeton's badly decomposed body in the field where Mercer had left it. Campbell's attorney reported the body to authorities. Arrest and trial Over the next few weeks, Campbell would later testify that Kansas City police approached him three separate times to question him about Keeton's disappearance and what he might have known about it. Campbell told them he knew nothing about it; he would later testify at a preliminary hearing that he was waiting for family to relocate from the area before he approached an attorney to come clean with what he knew about the murder. In late September, Campbell acquired an attorney, Sidney Willems, who helped him to find Keeton's badly decomposed body. The body was found in Johnson County, Missouri, on September 29 in the field where Mercer had left it.