Olathe ? A man charged with killing a suburban Kansas City girl nearly 30 years ago was identified Tuesday as having been seen in the area near where the girl was last seen.

Beth Reichmeier was among 10 witnesses, including the slain girl’s brother, who testified at a preliminary hearing for John Henry Horton, 56, who was charged last year with first-degree felony murder in the death of 13-year-old Lizabeth Wilson.

Reichmeier, 15 at the time of the incident, testified that she was walking across the parking lot at Shawnee Mission East High School in Prairie Village in July of 1974.

She said a man in a work shirt, whom she identified as Horton, asked her what time it was, and also asked if she had seen a co-worker dressed like him because he needed someone to stand on his shoulders to turn off an outdoor water spigot.

“I think he wanted my help,” Reichmeier said, although she said he didn’t directly ask for it.

She said a friend she had been playing tennis with walked up, and they left together.

Art Newcomer, a former administrator at the school, where Horton worked as a custodian, testified that the school had no water spigots that would require one person to get on another’s shoulders to operate.

Lizabeth’s brother, John Wilson, testified that he did not remember seeing Horton on the day his sister disappeared.

Wilson, 11 at the time, said he was trying to beat his sister home from the swimming pool.

“She wasn’t in front of me, and just about that time I heard her call my name from behind me, at the sidewalk, right at the center of the parking lot,” Wilson said. “I heard ‘John.’ I turned around. It was her. She was running.”

He never saw his sister again, and her skeletal remains were found six months later in a field in Lenexa.

Before he began presenting evidence, Rick Guinn, an assistant Johnson County district attorney, told District Judge James Franklin Davis that prosecutors believed Horton encountered Lizabeth moments after he talked to Reichmeier.

He said investigators thought Horton rendered the girl unconscious with chloroform. Detectives found bottles of the substance in the trunk of Horton’s car the day after Lizabeth disappeared, along with a container of ether, a butcher knife and two large canvas bags.

When the case was re-opened in 2001, detectives found a woman who said that in 1974, Horton knocked her out with chloroform and sexually molested her.

Horton is being held in the Johnson County jail on $1 million bond.