Killer FedEx driver Tanner Horner went home and had sex with his fiancée just hours after he kidnapped, sexually assaulted and then murdered 7-year-old Athena Strand, a jury has heard.
The confessed murderer made the sickening revelation in a twisted attempt to deny being a pedophile, according to forensic psychiatrist Dr Eileen Ryan, who interviewed him in jail several times after his arrest over the little girl’s 2022 slaying in Texas.
“He had sex with his fiancée,” Ryan, a defense witness, said under cross-examination Wednesday.
The twisted 34-year-old had allegedly told the psychiatrist he slept with his partner soon after the killing in an attempt to prove he wasn’t a pedophile — even though he admitted sexually assaulting the helpless 7-year-old girl.
“It says here… that that night, he had sex with his girlfriend — I won’t use her name — just to prove that he wasn’t into kids. That’s what he told you,” the prosecutor said while reading from Ryan’s notes.
Ryan, who interviewed Horner multiple times in prison, testified that she didn’t consider him to be a pedophile because such sickos needed to show consistent arousal in children.
“I was pressing him to find out more about any prior interest in kids [and] that was something that he told me,” Ryan said.
“He had sex with his fiancée, according to him.”
Elsewhere in her testimony, which solicited eye rolls from some members of the jury, Ryan went on to note that Horner — who will find out this week if he will face the death penalty — appeared to have a normal sex life with his future spouse.
In his prison interviews, Horner had also disclosed to the psychiatrist that he only forced the 7-year-old girl into his van after she apparently saw him “snorting cocaine” as he was delivering a Christmas to her family’s home in Paradise on Nov. 30, 2022, the doctor testified.
“Once she saw him doing cocaine, that was when he decided he had to do something to stop her from telling anyone,” Ryan said, adding that Horner was afraid of losing his job and losing contact with his son when he made the “completely unreasonable” jump from “Point A to Point Z.”
The killer also admitted to assaulting Athena — despite initially denying it — after being probed by the psychiatrist, according to the doctor’s testimony.
Initially, Horner had told authorities he’d accidentally struck the 67-pound child with his van and then strangled her in a fit of panic after delivering the package gift.
He also previously blamed his alternate persona, whom he called “Zero,” for the strangling.
But prosecutors have repeatedly branded Horner a liar, especially after surveillance video captured the child sitting inside the delivery truck — largely unharmed — shortly after her abduction.
Athena’s naked body was found two days after she was kidnapped in a rural creek.
A medical examiner determined she had died from blunt force trauma, smothering, and strangulation.
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