JACKSON (AP) — A 2013 trial date has been set for a legally dead Mississippi man facing federal charges in the kidnapping of a 12-year-old Las Vegas girl whose body was found last year in Louisiana.

Thomas Steven Sanders was declared dead in Mississippi in 1994 after he abandoned his family seven years earlier. Now he’s suspected in the deaths of Lexis Roberts, whose body was found Oct. 8 by hunters in Louisiana’s Catahoula Parish, and her mother, 31-year-old Suellen Roberts, whose body was found the next month in northwestern Arizona’s Yavapai County.

U.S. District Judge Dee Drell set the trial date in Lexis Robert’s abduction for Jan. 14, 2013, in Alexandria, La., where Sanders is charged with the girl’s kidnapping. Drell set aside 25 days for the trial in an order issued Thursday.

Sanders has pleaded not guilty. He could face the death penalty on the federal kidnapping charge because the abduction resulted in death. Arizona, Louisiana and federal officials have been working together on the case.

Arizona and Louisiana authorities have said Sanders will also face state charges.

Sanders’ attorney did not immediately respond to a message Friday. A call to the U.S. attorney’s office was not immediately returned.

Sanders was arrested in Gulfport, Miss., in February after a massive manhunt. Authorities say Sanders and Suellen Roberts were in a relationship when they set out on a road trip for the Labor Day weekend. The last place the mother and daughter were seen alive was in Arizona.

Authorities say security footage showed Sanders buying ammunition at a Walmart in Las Vegas about a month before Lexis Robert’s body was found. The bullets he purchased were the same type that killed the girl, police said.

The mother and daughter’s disappearances worried authorities early on, but the case took a bizarre twist when investigators realized their prime suspect had been declared legally dead 17 years earlier.

Sanders’ parents, brother and ex-wife petitioned a Mississippi court for the death declaration in 1994, saying nobody had heard from him in seven years. Even so, Sanders drifted from state to state unnoticed despite being arrested in Georgia and Tennessee under his real name.