HARRISONVILLE, MO. ? A man who fathered four children with his teenage daughter has been charged with murder after the remains of two infants were found in coolers on property where the family once lived, authorities announced Friday.

The 47-year-old is charged with one count each of second-degree murder, endangering the welfare of a child and statutory rape, and two counts each of incest and abandoning a corpse.

At a news conference earlier in the day, Cass County prosecutor Teresa Hensley said three of the four children the man fathered with his now-19-year-old daughter are dead, but he has been charged with just one of the deaths so far.

Authorities allege that the man began molesting his daughter when she was 13 and that the teenager’s mother knew about the abuse and helped her husband deliver their grandchildren.

At an arraignment Friday afternoon, the man said he did not yet have any attorney and peered down at court documents as Judge Thomas M. Campbell read the charges.

He indicated to the judge that he didn’t understand the murder charge, and Campbell repeated it to him a few times.

The Associated Press is withholding the suspect’s name to protect the identity of his daughter, an alleged sexual assault victim.

The father was arrested Wednesday night in Daviess County, where he had been living recently.

The next hearing for the father is scheduled for 9 a.m. on Jan. 29.

Both parents involved

According to court documents, the daughter told police that he had fathered all four children, while the father told detectives he was certain two of them were his. Both said all the children were delivered at home by the father and his wife.

That woman is charged with endangering the welfare of a child for not reporting the alleged sexual abuse of her daughter. She is free on $10,000 bond.

“We have a child who at age 13 had her father sexually molesting her. And her mother allowed it,” Hensley said. “Who she would have turned to is hard to determine. For six years (the daughter) was under his control.”

The father is charged in the death of a boy who was born Nov. 17, 2006, and believed to have died of pneumonia on Feb. 28, 2007.

Authorities believe the baby became ill and that the suspect and his daughter, who has not been charged, never sought medical attention.

Investigators are still looking into the death of the other infant. The daughter told investigators her father assisted with the birth in April 2008 and that he told her the child was stillborn, according to the probable cause statement. A third child fathered by the suspect also is dead and is believed to be in Oklahoma.

Hensley and Sheriff Dwight Diehl referred questions about that death to Oklahoma authorities.

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and the state medical examiner said they were not familiar with the case.

The surviving child is a 3-year-old boy who is in state custody, Hensley said.

Court documents state the wife told police that she was jealous of the close relationship between her husband and her daughter. Asked why she stayed married to her husband, the woman became upset and said “she wasn’t good enough to find anyone else,” according to a probable cause statement.

The woman also told a detective that she desperately wanted a son and would accept one even if her husband fathered the child with her daughter, according to the statement.

Calls to multiple phone numbers under her name were not answered Friday. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the woman has an attorney.

Family reaction

Theresa Sims, a relative who attended Friday’s arraignment for the father, said the extended family didn’t know about the alleged sexual abuse or the 19-year-old’s children until October 2008, when one of the teenager’s sisters contacted police.

“We never knew anything, never seen any babies. When we first heard about it, it was just hard to believe,” Sims said.

After receiving the sister’s tip, Cass County authorities used cadaver dogs to search the rural property where the family once lived. Nothing was found during that search, but on Jan. 1 the new owners of the property found two small coolers and contacted police.

Inside each cooler was the body of a child, officials said.

The suspect’s mother said her son and granddaughter had lived in a camper trailer beside the house where she lived north of Harrisonville, and she wasn’t allowed to go back there.

“I didn’t know there was a baby,” she said. “He’s my son and I love him, but I can’t go along with this.”

She said neither her son nor his wife ever worked.

“They should never have been parents,” she said.

The 18-year-old sister who contacted authorities and another sister told KMBC-TV in Kansas City that the family lived in seclusion behind locked gates and that the children were told never to report what was happening.

“Our dad told us if we’d say something, we’re dead. We’d get in trouble,” the 18-year-old said.

The sisters said they moved frequently, and police said the daughters were never able to attend school.