She called him Uncle Chris. Now he's being executed for her murder. Who was Rowan Ford?

Nine-year-old Rowan Ford's hair was usually matted, sometimes crawling with lice. She lived in a ramshackle home and sometimes showed up to school without socks in the frigid Missouri winter.

Despite her circumstances, Rowan was a star student whose smile and work ethic won the hearts of her teachers.

And then one day, the girl who showed up to class early and eager was gone. She was reported missing on Nov. 3, 2007, triggering an Amber alert and a week-long search that ended with her battered body being found in a cave.

One teacher kept Rowan's desk untouched for days because he couldn't face what clearing it out meant.

"I'll never be able to walk into that classroom ever again and not tell you exactly where Rowan was sitting the day she went missing and exactly where her desk was sitting the day we found out she was gone," testified Todd Holt, a fourth-grade teacher at Triway Elementary School in the tiny southwestern Missouri village of Stella. "She's the kind of kid that I think that every schoolteacher could want. I mean, she showed up at school and it was all about work, it was all about what Rowan was going to do to be able to get ahead in life."

Another teacher testified: "She was just a little ray of sunshine, just the sweetest girl you would ever meet."

Now, when Rowan would have been 26 years old, her killer is set to be executed for her rape and murder on Tuesday. Paste BN is looking back at the crime and how much Rowan was loved in her short life.

What happened to Rowan Ford?

On the night of Nov. 2, 2007, Rowan's stepfather, David Spears, was partying with two friends while her mother was working an overnight shift at Walmart. Rowan knew one of the friends as Uncle Chris, a man who had lived in her home for several months and had even helped her with her homework, according to court records.

Uncle Chris is Christopher Leroy Collings, who was convicted of Rowan's murder.

At some point on that terrible night, the drunken men left Rowan home alone and went to Collings’ trailer. As the third friend drove Spears home on back roads to avoid the police, Collings said he raced to Spears’ home and kidnapped a sleeping Rowan, put her in his truck and took her to his trailer.

Once there, he admitted to raping the girl. He told police he then intended to take her home, leading her outside facing away from him so she wouldn't see his face, and not speaking so she wouldn't hear his voice.

But he said Rowan turned around and, because there was moonlight, recognized who he was. That’s when he said he “freaked out.”

“Seeing a coil of cord in the bed of a pickup next to him, he took the cord, looped it around her neck and started pulling real hard,” court records say. “She struggled a little and fell to the ground; he went to the ground with her and held tight until she stopped moving.”

Collings said he then dumped Rowan's body in a cave. She was found about a week later on Nov. 9.

Rowan Ford's small community devastated

The news of Rowan's disappearance − reported when her mother returned home from work and couldn't find the girl − was shocking for her tiny community in Stella, which has a population of less than 200 people.

Everyone knew Rowan as a bubbly little girl who was always on her purple bicycle, loved going to church so much she sometimes went alone and had her bedroom painted Barbie pink. Much of the community turned out for an exhaustive search for Rowan and held out hope up until the devastating news that she had been found dead.

The morning before her funeral, teachers and students at Rowan's school planted a pink dogwood tree in her honor and released purple balloons, attached to which were notes from her classmates. A concrete angel was placed in the spot, as well as a marker reading April 11, 1998, for the day she was born and Nov. 9, 2007, as the day her body was found.

"Rowan was special," Holt recalled in court of his student, saying she always had her head in a book and worked hard at math even though it was challenging for her.

Another teacher, Tammy Marshall, remembered the last day she saw Rowan. It was just hours before the girl would be kidnapped.

Marshall had noticed Rowan's hair was especially tangled and messy, so she offered to brush it out. The teacher and the girl spent about 30 minutes together before class as Marshall untangled her hair and got it into a ponytail.

Later that day, Marshall was looking for Rowan to see if her hair had held up. And then "she came skipping by me."

"She was by herself and she just went skipping by," she remembered. "She looked so happy as she skipped by me. Like everything was great with her."

Rowan's loved ones grieve

Rowan's mother, Colleen Grace Munson, was working to support her family when her daughter was kidnapped and killed.

During her testimony at Collings' trial, she shared her deep sorrow and described how her life had become a shell.

"There's not much of a life. I cry a lot," she said, adding that she had authorities admit her to psychiatric care at one point.

"It was six months after Rowan was found, and I just couldn't take any more," she said. "I've been in the hospital a couple of times. I'm under psychiatric care right now, trying to get my life back to a simple ... something of a life."

Ariane Parsons, Rowan's older sister, told the court that she collapsed to the floor when she heard her sister had been killed.

"Everybody in my family went into deep depression," she said.

April Dawn Counts, the mother of Rowan's best friend Tyler, described how the two kids would sit together in church, ride bikes, and how the shy little girl kept her boisterous son in check. Every year since the girl's death, Counts' family buys a Christmas ornament to remember her.

"It's the closest thing I've known to losing my own child," she said. "For quite a while my son couldn't sleep alone ... He still talks about her."

Paste BN relied heavily on courtroom testimony from Rowan's family, friends and teachers during Colling's trial in 2012. Requests to speak to them through the Missouri Attorney General's Office went unanswered, and efforts to reach them through social media were unsuccessful