‘I feel like Dexter’: Teen obsessed with horrorcore rap lured 13-year-old girl to woods where he raped and murdered her as part of his ‘fantasy’

An Oregon jury convicted a runaway teen who murdered and raped a 13-year-old girl after luring her to where he had been living in the woods — and where he also kept a shrine to a horrorcore rapper and a diary that professed his love for a fictional serial killer.

Daniel Ryan Gore, 18, was found guilty of first-degree murder, rape and sexual abuse in the 2022 death of 13-year-old Milana Li, the Washington County District Attorney’s Office said. Prosecutors told jurors that Gore was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” who gave Milana a “false sense of security.”

Milana was last seen alive around 7:45 p.m. May 8, 2022. Her mother reported her missing the next day after returning home from her overnight shift at work and learning she had never showed up at school. The mother and one of her daughter’s friends went to a nearby wooded area in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, where they found some of Milana’s clothes. They called police, who started searching the area.

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Cops quickly found the girl’s body half-submerged in a creek under a blanket. She had been strangled. Investigators discovered packaging related to the blanket in Gore’s tent. After identifying Gore, then 16, as a suspect, Beaverton police tracked him to a library two days after the slaying. He tried to escape out of an emergency exit but officers caught him.

Detectives later learned that the defendant had called his then-girlfriend the night of the murder and told her something bad had happened but he “took care of it.”

According to a courtroom report from the Oregonian newspaper, Gore had runaway from his home in Salem several months prior to the murder. He and Milana became friends and spent the night in question aimlessly riding a bus before he took her to the woods for their fatal encounter.

After the murder, Gore reportedly tried to establish an alibi by going to a friend’s house and sending Milana text messages. He also told several people that he and Milana went their separate ways earlier in the night. But surveillance video and cellphone data showed the pair had been together.

While processing the scene in and around Gore’s tent, investigators reportedly found an ode to the rapper 7XVN, who is known for his horrorcore music which touches on violent subjects like cannibalism. His latest track on YouTube is a song called “I Want to Eat Your Face.” Gore reportedly had etched in a tree symbols tied to the rapper along with a skull mask associated with him. Cops also reportedly found a diary with the phrase “I feel like Dexter,” referencing the fictional TV serial killer from the Showtime series “Dexter.” There were also searches on his phone about sexual assault.