Spears terminated after legislator outcry

The stalemate between legislators and the Missouri State Public Defender’s office ended with the termination of David Spears, the administrative assistant who was employed in the West Plains office until Feb. 24. Gina Hall, Human Resources Manager for the agency, confirmed Spears’ nearly four years of employment in Howell County ended two days before a second attempt at a House Budget committee hearing. 

 

As previously reported by Howell County News, members of the committee responsible for proposing a statewide budget draft refused to hear one word from Director Mary Fox on Feb. 13 on her agency’s budget. A presentation from Rep. Lane Roberts on Spears’ connection to the late Rowan Ford’s murder drew outage from both Democrats and Republicans, who walked out of the first hearing in protest.

 

Though he was initially charged with the murder and rape of his stepdaughter, Spears pleaded guilty to two felonies in 2012 — the class C felony of endangering the welfare of a child and class D felony of hindering prosecution — in the 2007 case involving the murder of Ford. He was sentenced to 11 years and released in 2015 on parole. 

 

He worked at the public defender’s office as a clerk typist in Clayton from June 2016 to May 2019 and returned in April 2020 to the West Plains office as an administrative assistant, where he worked until he was terminated on Feb. 24, 2025. Fox confirmed Spears was hired while the State Defender’s office represented Christopher Collings in appeals – the man who was convicted of and executed for the murder. 

In the Feb. 26 hearing, Rep. Roberts, who is not a sitting member of the Budget Committee, had the floor before Fox began her presentation. 

 

“I want the committee to know the [Public Defender’s] office has complied with everything we called upon them to do. I ask the committee to consider this matter closed and to proceed…” Roberts said. 

 

Roberts penned a letter in December 2024 calling on the Public Defender commission to both terminate Spears and revise their hiring practices to prevent another hire like his. 

 

State Senator for Howell County’s district, Brad Hudson, who signed Roberts’ letter, agrees the hire should not have happened. He also said the resolution was harder to achieve than it should have been.

 

“I believe that a higher level of scrutiny is needed so that something like this can never happen again. It shouldn’t take a committee hearing and threat of withholding funding for a state agency to do the right thing,” Hudson told the News on Feb 27.

 

“I had the Director of the Missouri State Public Defender System, [Fox], in my office earlier this session to answer why they were denying the request of multiple legislators to fire David Spears. Her answers were less than satisfactory. Had the House Budget Committee not taken the action they did, I was prepared to request a decrease in the public defender’s office budget in the amount of Spears’ salary and benefits. The will of the people, expressed through the Legislature, needs to be listened to by our state agencies and departments,” Hudson said.

 

Fox did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Hudson, along with Roberts, considers the issue to be “settled.”

 

“But I would caution the citizens to stay vigilant,” he said. “Your government is here to serve you, not the other way around, and you should always speak out when you see something happening that you disagree with.”