Kansas City, Mo. ? A man who is set to stand trial in November after allegedly kidnapping his children told a newspaper that the children are with a “well-off family.”

Daniel Porter has refused to tell police and his ex-wife the whereabouts of the two children since they disappeared in June 2004 when he picked them up for a weekend visit.

“The children are fine,” Daniel Porter told The Kansas City Star in a telephone call from his jail cell.

Porter refused to say where the children are staying.

Porter was sentenced in May to 10 years in prison on an unrelated gun charge, a sentence that prosecutors hoped would persuade him to reveal the whereabouts of his children, Sam and Lindsey.

Since the children, then 7 and 8, disappeared, investigators have searched the Kansas City suburbs of Independence and Sugar Creek and searched the area around Porter’s hometown of Trenton in northern Missouri.

The Star said Porter placed a 17-minute collect call from the Jackson County Corrections Center to the newspaper on June 3. The Star said it did not run the story until it could confirm that Porter had made the call.

Porter has also told detectives that the children are alive and fine, Independence Police Sgt. Dennis Green said.

“I’ll believe it when I see it – when he says go to such and such address,” Green said.

Porter said he took the children because his ex-wife, Tina, was a bad parent. The couple divorced in November.

Porter said the couple keeping the children knows that legal problems are possible.

“The people who’s got them didn’t want a dime from me,” Porter said. “I planned this. They may get into more trouble than me.”

He also said he made up stories about strangling his children because he didn’t like being questioned by police. When asked whether he had, in fact, strangled the children, Porter did not answer and changed the subject, the Star reported.

Tina Porter said she believes her ex-husband is trying to raise her hopes that the children are alive so that he can dash them later.

“If Sam and Lindsey could find their way home, they’d already be home,” she said. “They love me enough. That’s reality.”

Green said the investigation has come to a standstill.

“He is the only key to this,” Green said. “He knows it, and I think he likes it. He’s getting a power trip. It’s his way of continuing to have power over Tina and probably the police.”

Porter, 42, is charged by the state with two counts each of terroristic kidnapping and parental kidnapping, for which he faces up to 38 years in prison. He is scheduled for trial in November.

Porter pleaded guilty in January to being a felon in possession of firearms and was sentenced last month to 10 years in prison.

“Mr. Porter holds the keys to his jail cell,” Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders said then, expressing hope that the defendant would soon provide clues to his children’s location.