Grain Valley, Mo. ? Prosecutors on Thursday were reviewing police reports for possible criminal charges against a couple who admitted faking the birth of sextuplets and taking donations so they could pay their bills.

Van Buckley, a spokeswoman for Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders, said he did not expect an announcement of any charges against Kris and Sarah Everson until today at the earliest.

“It’s my understanding that police are still taking statements from victims,” Buckley said.

Earlier Thursday, Sarah Everson told The Associated Press that her husband believed for months that she was pregnant.

“He had no clue I wasn’t pregnant until a couple of weeks ago,” Sarah Everson said in a brief cell phone interview.

No arrests made

On Wednesday, the couple tearfully acknowledged taking donations for the nonexistent sextuplets. They had not been arrested by late Thursday afternoon, and Grain Valley Police Chief Aaron Ambrose said he does not consider them a flight risk.

Kris Everson, who worked on the assembly line at the Haldex plant in Grain Valley, no longer has a job there, the company said. A spokeswoman refused to say whether Everson quit or was fired.

On Thursday, Ambrose – who has not been present when detectives questioned the Eversons – said detectives told him Sarah Everson furthered her ruse by overeating.

“She told them she gained about 40 pounds,” Ambrose said, adding that she had told detectives she duped her husband until about a month ago, which would have been around the time the couple had claimed the babies were born.

Ambrose said it was not clear exactly when Sarah Everson told her husband of the ruse. The couple had said the babies were born March 8.

“It was somewhere in that time frame,” Ambrose said.

Everson, who was not at home late Thursday morning, refused to say how she kept her husband from finding out she wasn’t really pregnant, until she finally told him.

“I don’t have an answer for that,” she said. “I’ve been asked that question so many times that it’s not even funny.”

Police were still collecting reports from people who gave money through a Web site – since taken down, after the couple’s story began unraveling earlier this week – that solicited donations for the fictitious sextuplets.

“As of right now, I can tell you there’s more than $4,000 involved, and that’s just the money,” Ambrose said. “That doesn’t count the material items people might have given them.”

Co-workers informed

Kris Everson had been telling co-workers since December that his wife was pregnant with multiple babies, Haldex human resources manager Cathi Christina said.

“He came to us, told us he and his wife were going to have quintuplets,” Christina said. “Then, miraculously, they had six in March – or reported that, anyway. A lot of people rallied around. They gathered $800 or $900 that we gave them.”

Now, Christina said, Kris Everson’s former co-workers don’t know what to think.

“There’s just a mixed bag of emotions,” she said. “We feel sorry for them in some regards. They’re just, what’s the word for it, far off base on how they went about getting help. There’s some anger – disbelief they did it.”

At the Scale House Grill off Interstate 70, waitress Nancy Ivie called the case “bizarre.”

“Either she needs a good jail term or some mental help,” Ivie said.

Across the street at the McStop convenience store, Debbie Bryant said she read a story about the Eversons and the sextuplets in The Examiner in Independence, before the scandal broke.

“I thought, ‘Better her than me,”‘ Bryant said, taking a break from loading ice into an outside freezer. “Now, I can’t believe they did that. Not in this town. It’s a pretty quiet town.”