J.D. Gallop

FLORIDA TODAY

Jury selection is underway for the trial of a Cocoa man charged with kidnapping a Bahamian woman and burying her alive in concrete a decade ago.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for 37-year-old Vahtiece Alfonzo Kirkman, who is already serving a life sentence in state prison for his role in the 2006 robbery-related shooting death of 29-year-old Willie Parker in Cocoa.

Prosecutors say Kirkman learned that the victim in the latest case – 22-year-old Darice Knowles – had gone out on a date with a Cocoa police officer after Parker’s slaying and suspected she was giving the officer information about his involvement. Kirkman then hatched a plan to kidnap and kill Knowles, with help from her boyfriend, Christopher Pratt.

The trial – the second murder conviction case the state has pursued against Kirkman – is being held at the Moore Justice Center in Viera and is expected to last two weeks.

Jurors will hear from several witnesses who will detail how Knowles traveled from her home in the Bahamas to visit friends in Cocoa.

She was staying with Pratt when she went missing a short time later in March 2006, authorities said.

Family members tried desperately to contact Knowles for several weeks after she failed to return the islands.

Knowles had participated in the Miss Bahamas Universe contest in 2004, smiling and posing playfully with a dolphin in photos later posted on social media by family members.

The case went cold until police received a break in July 2010.

Pratt, who offered to testify against his former friend and cohort, pled guilty to Knowles’ killing and led detectives to a thickly-wooded site off of State Road 524 where the Bahamian student was taken, duct-taped and then covered with concrete while she was still alive, prosecutors said.

Police said that before the burial, Kirkman beat Darice and tied her up in the back seat of a gold Dodge van while he asked friends to give him a ride to a home improvement store to buy a shovel, pre-mixed concrete and duct tape, reports show. That van, a rental leased out to Pratt, was later set on fire and abandoned.

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Pratt later told friends that he took Knowles back to Orlando International Airport to go back to the Bahamas and that she had cheated on him with a Cocoa police officer.

Police said the pair had actually taken Knowles to the woods, placed her in a home and covered her in lime and concrete. They then carried out the burial.

Later, acting on a tip from a cellmate who knew Pratt, Cocoa detectives spent several days carefully going through the brush along State Road 524, just west of Cox Road.

"We're hopeful that we will find something. So far we have cleared away a full acre of land and are moving into another parcel,” then police spokeswoman Barbara Matthews told FLORIDA TODAY.

Police cleared away more than an acre of land, using city work crews and heavy equipment to search for what would turn out to be Knowles’ body entombed in four foot-deep hole packed with concrete and dirt.

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Detectives first found a lump of soft concrete in a patch of overgrown brush and then two small bones at what later was determined to be the site where Knowles’ remains were cast in concrete.

Forensic investigators carefully removed over 1,600 cubic feet of dirt from the site and had an anthropologist examine Knowles’ remains to determine just how long she had been buried.

Kirkman is being held at the Brevard County Jail Complex for the duration of the trial.