KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Police are investigating after a body was discovered inside a burnt car on rural property in eastern Jackson county Tuesday.
Emergency units responded to a reported burnt car around 12:45 p.m. about a quarter mile from the road near Woods Chapel Road and Little Blue Parkway.
The person who found the car said it appeared to be a Monte Carlo, but the could not determine the color because it was so charred.
The car was found about a quarter mile down an unpaved road, in the woods near a pond.
"You see this in the news all the time. I just wish it was a burnt out car but it wasn't. Somebody was in it. That's all I can say," said Jim Stoneman.
Stoneman said he was on his way to the pond on his property at about 11:30 a.m. to feed the fish with his brother-in-law.
"I said 'hey, you smell smoke?' He goes, 'yeah,'" Stoneman recalled. "So we got down about another hundred feet and I saw this car burnt up, and I'm like, 'oh no,' and it wasn't smoldering or nothing. It was done burning."
What was inside, Stoneman said, was a body.
"I did look in it, you know. That's all I'm going to say," Stoneman added. "It wasn't a pretty sight."
There was the body of a person with a small frame in the middle of the front seat. Police said they believe it was a woman or possibly a child.
"I hope it was just somebody, you know, maybe still in the car, and trying to hide it, and they just end up costing their life. I hope it's not anybody else, you know like a murder or anything like that."
Stoneman said whoever drove the car back there must have driven the car into his neighbor's driveway and just kept going until the car hit a stump.
His mother-in-law, who did not want to appear on camera, believes it happened just after 11 p.m. Monday night when she heard an explosion.
"I called in the front room and asked the boys if they heard that noise and all of them said, 'no, we're watching TV,'" she recalled. "It was a pretty loud explosion. You could tell it wasn't just a gun."
Bomb and arson squads were still at the scene into Tuesday evening.
At this time, police are handling it as a death investigation. The investigation is ongoing.
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