A man who is accused of killing his daughter near Desert Hot Springs, then wrapping the two-month-old in plastic and traveling around the country with the body before leaving the corpse in a camper in Arkansas, pleaded not guilty Friday to murder and other charges.
Jason Michael Hann, 34, was indicted by a grand jury on Sept. 11 on charges of first-degree murder and assaulting a child causing great bodily injury related to the February 2001 death of his months-old daughter, Montana, in their trailer in an unincorporated area of Desert Hot Springs.
He also faces a special circumstance allegation of a previous murder conviction, which makes him eligible for the death penalty if found guilty.
Prosecutors will decide later whether to seek capital punishment for Hann. Hann was extradited to Riverside County on Monday from Kentucky, where he was serving time for the 1999 murder of his first son.
Defense attorney Gregory Johnson asked that his client be allowed to see a psychiatrist at the jail so he could get access to some medication he had been taking previously.
Also charged in the killing is the mother of the child, Krissy Lynn Werntz, who is out of custody on her own recognizance.
The 29-year-old woman was also due in court Friday for a pretrial hearing, but her appearance was waived because she is living in Indiana.
Werntz was also indicted by the grand jury on a murder charge in the death of the couple's child.
Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jeffery Gunther ordered both defendants to appear before him on Dec 1.
Werntz's attorney, Deputy Public Defender Andrea Rathburn, said outside the courtroom that her client is eager to prove her innocence and "really
wants this to go to trial as soon as possible.''
Montana was born in Arizona in December 2000, and the family moved to a trailer park near Desert Hot Springs about a month later, according to a
declaration in support of an arrest warrant prepared by Riverside County sheriff's Investigator gary LeClair.
Werntz told LeClair that on Feb. 10, 2001, she had gone to work and Hann had stayed home in their motor home with Montana that day.
Werntz said when she returned home, she picked up the infant from a bed in the bathtub, but the baby was dead, according to LeClair.
Hann told a Maine detective in 2002 that he had lost his temper and hit the baby on the side of the head with his hand, and she died later that day,
LeClair wrote.
Hann decided to keep his daughter in a trash bag so they could keep her with them, according to LeClair, adding that the couple left California two
months later to travel around the nation.
The couple left their daughter's corpse in a trailer at a storage facility in Wynne, Ark., but when they didn't make the rental payments, property managers seized the unit and put the contents up for sale, according to LeClair.
A man later bought the trailer from the unit and while cleaning it out, found the infant's decomposed body. A coroner in Arkansas completed the autopsy and the death was determined to be homicide by undetermined means, LeClair wrote.
The infant's injuries included skull and leg fractures, but it was unclear whether they were caused before or after her death.
The couple was arrested in April 2002 by Maine authorities at a Motel 6, according to court documents. They were sent to Arkansas in June 2002 to stand trial for the death of their daughter, but a judge there ordered the case to be turned over to California authorities because the death occurred in Riverside County, LeClair wrote.
Hann is being held at the Indio Jail without bail.
