Florida Holds Child-Murder Suspect

(CBS/AP)  No decision has been made whether to seek the death penalty for the registered sex offender Florida police say confessed to strangling a 13-year-old girl.

David Onstott, 36, was ordered held without bond at an arraignment Monday. He was charged with first-degree murder Sunday, after the registered sex offender allegedly confessed to killing the girl, saying he got into an argument with her and he choked her to death in her home.

Over the weekend, deputies found Sarah Lunde's partially-clothed body floating in a pond near the child's home, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta.

During the arraignment, Onstott did not speak.

"You don't have to make any plea at all," Judge Walter Heinrich told him. "But understand very clearly, make absolutely no mistakes: If you plead guilty today, you're going to be sentenced to jail time. The only question: how long in jail I'm going to give you."

Sarah was last seen April 9, shortly after returning home from a church trip. Early the next morning, Onstott paid an unexpected visit to the family's home to look for Sarah's mother, Kelly May Lunde, whom he once dated, Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee said.

After Sarah let Onstott into the house, they got into an argument and Onstott put her in a choke hold and killed her, Gee said.

"You are talking about a person who would murder a child. Who knows what's in his mind," Gee said.

"I think that there are only two people that really know what happened during those early morning hours, and one of them can't tell us any more," Gee said on CBS News' The Early Show. "So we're getting his side of the story and I think we're going to have to wait for the forensic evidence to help us make a better determination of what actually happened."

Sarah's 17-year-old brother came home later and found the front door wide open and his sister gone, but the family initially assumed Sarah had gone to a friend's house. She was not reported missing until April 11.

Gee said Onstott "went to great effort to keep her body from being discovered."

Onstott, who spent 5 1/2 years in prison after being convicted in 1995 of raping an adult acquaintance, has been held without bail in the Hillsborough County Jail since Tuesday on unrelated charges.

Another young Tampa-area girl, Jessica Lunsford, allegedly was murdered by a convicted child molester last month.

And CBS' Acosta reports that convicted sex offenders are four times more likely to repeat their crimes than non-sex offenders. Victims' families say registering these criminals on state Web sites is not nearly enough to prevent a criminal act from happening again.

"For many kinds of sex offenders there really is no such thing as rehabilitation for them," University of Louisville criminologist Richard Tewksberry told Acosta.

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