JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — It’s official: David Spears no longer works for the Missouri State public defender’s office. As of Monday he was terminated and lawmakers got what they wanted.

At a budget hearing nearly two weeks ago, lawmakers told Mary Fox, Director of the Missouri State Public Defender’s office, she needed to find a way to fire Spears before they would even listen to the agency’s budget proposal.

Wednesday morning, Fox came back to the budget committee to tell them about the decision to end Spears’ employment.

Firing Spears was the linchpin for the MSPD’s ability to get its budget heard and approved by state lawmakers.

Spears, as we first told you in December, was hired by the MSPD in 2016, about a year after being released from prison for his role in the murder of his stepdaughter, 9-year-old Rowan Ford.

His best friend, Christopher Collings, was convicted of the girl’s rape and murder and was executed in December after losing all his appeals.

Both men initially confessed to raping and murdering Rowan. Spears’ confession was thrown out and he ended up pleading guilty to lesser charges.

While his conviction was for child endangerment and hindering prosecution in the 2007 homicide, the public defender’s office was standing by its man, trying to mitigate Spears’s role in the crime.

“Mr. Spears, the person who is employed by the public defender system, was not convicted of the murder, was not convicted of the sexual assaults,” Fox said “In fact, according to the prosecutor at the time, his convictions were for leaving his stepdaughter alone to go drinking with friends and asking a friend to lie to law enforcement about why he left the child alone.”

Representative Lane Roberts (R-Joplin), who was Joplin’s police chief at the time of Ford’s murder, disagreed with Fox about the level of involvement Spears had in the case and whether Spears had led authorities to the little girl’s body.

Current Newton County Commissioner, Greg Bridges, was the county coroner when Ford was killed. We spoke to Bridges after the budget committee hearing two weeks ago to ask him about the disagreement between Fox and Roberts.

Bridges said it was Spears who led them to the little girl’s body. He told us he was even wearing an FBI wire and there is a recording “somewhere.”

It was also Bridges who obtained the original confession from Spears. He was brought in because he knew Spears and Collings. Both Bridges and Roberts agree that court filings in the Collings appellate cases, describe details and testimony about Spears that can’t be ignored.

“It was David Spears, who sat quietly for six days while the mother was searching for her child and he didn’t tell her,” says Roberts. “More importantly he’s on the local media playing the part of a father begging people to return his child while her mother is standing right there. This man’s conduct was despicable.”

Despite the scathing rebuke from lawmakers, when the commission met last week, there was no mention of Spears. It did make a second change to the agency’s hiring procedures in as many months.

In January, after receiving a letter from Roberts and 15 other lawmakers, upset by the revelation that Spears worked for the public defender’s office, the commission added a level of oversight to the hiring process for any applicant with a felony conviction. The most recent change requires the full commission get involved if there is a disagreement about a potential hire. Something Roberts believed was a necessary step the commission failed to take with its initial change.

The first change was, as Roberts pointed out, “a token response.”

“I want to know how you’re going to terminate him, not why you can’t.”

With Wednesday’s announcement, it appears the agency found a way.