Man charged with dismembering wife's body in front of his 2 kids inside Kansas City hotel

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- (WDAF) -- A 35-year-old husband is accused of dismembering and abandoning the corpse of his wife, and on Wednesday Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker filed charges against him.

Justin Rey, 35, is charged with abandonment of a corpse and endangering the welfare of a child.

According to court records filed Wednesday, police believe Rey's children were in the Kansas City hotel room as he dismembered and disposed of their mother's body. Jessica Rey's dismembered body was found inside a cooler at a Lenexa storage facility on October 24.

Their two children are age two and a newborn born on Oct. 20.

When he was arrested, police say Rey told them his wife delivered their baby in the bath tub of a hotel room near I-70 and Stadium Drive, where they'd been staying since Sept. 25. He told them he used a plastic fastner and a shoe string to secure the umbilical cord. He told police she died after childbirth and he placed her in the bed and then took pictures with his wife and kids together. He says he spent two days with her body, Friday and Saturday, before dismembering her and then taking her body in the cooler to the storage facility in Lenexa.

Detectives say Rey admitted to cutting up his wife Jessica in the bathtub and then putting her body parts in the cooler. What didn't fit in the cooler, he said he flushed down the toilet or boiled in a pot on the stove.

Lenexa police were tipped off about Rey after the U-haul Storage Facility contacted them. They said he was suspiciously talking about his wife dying while giving birth to their newborn. When police found him at the storage facility, they say he told them his wife had died from suicide after giving birth.

"The suspect spontaneously informed the officers his wife was inside the cooler and looked to the direction of a red and white Igloo style cooler with wheels," the probable cause statement said.