Beaten child leads police to bodies in freezer

A BRUISED and starving seven-year-old girl walking alone on a gravel road led investigators to an even grimmer discovery: remains in a basement freezer that her adoptive mother said were the youngster’s sisters.

Police looking for evidence of child abuse found frozen human remains in the house in Maryland, USA.

Police believe the mother, Renee Bowman, is responsible for killing her other two daughters. The three girls were foster children in Bowman’s care before she adopted them.

Sheriff’s deputies were investigating an abuse complaint when they discovered the child-sized remains encased in ice. The mother told investigators they had been in her southern Maryland home’s freezer for at least seven months and police said they are considering the case a homicide.

“We have reason to believe that’s the two children in the freezer,” said Lt Bobby Jones of Calvert County Sheriff’s Office. “We believe that the mother, who adopted the two children, is responsible.”

Autopsies would need to be completed before authorities know for sure whether it is the girls, aged nine and 11.

Deputies made the gruesome find in Lusby, about 75km south-east of Washington DC. They were at the home with a search warrant to investigate what happened to a runaway seven-year-old girl who was found wandering the neighbourhood, injured and hungry in a blood and faeces -soaked nightshirt.

Bowman, 43, has been arrested, and a judge ordered her held without bond. She is charged with first-degree child abuse in the beating of the seven-year-old.

“I asked if she was ok. She said no,” said neighbour Phillip Garrett, who found the girl walking down the street. “She said, ‘My mother beats me to death all the time.’”

She escaped from a locked bedroom by jumping out a second-story window, and Bowman admitted beating her with a “hard-heeled shoe,” officials said.

Bowman told detectives she brought the remains of her other daughters with her when she moved in February from Rockville, about 60 miles away. Montgomery police said they are investigating whether the deaths took place in Rockville and detectives are trying to pin down when the older girls were last seen alive. Bowman has not been charged with the deaths.

The medical examiner’s office planned to examine the freezer and its contents, but it was unclear how long it would take for the remains to thaw sufficiently.

Bowman was a foster mother to all three before adopting them in the District of Columbia, officials said at a news conference.

According to charging documents in Calvert County, the youngest girl went door-to-door looking for help. The girl had open sores and lesions on her buttocks and lower thighs, marks on her neck made by a cord, rope or other item and bruises on her hands and lips, police said.

The girl was brought to a hospital. The Maryland Department of Human Resources planned to petition the court to gain custody, said Nancy Lineman, an agency spokeswoman.

Garrett, 21, who lives two houses down from Bowman, said he brought the girl to a neighbour’s house, called 911 and ordered her a pizza. She indicated she had last eaten last Tuesday when her father was at the home, said Garrett, who realised he had met her mother once and described her as “frazzled”.

“She didn’t seem like all her pieces were there,” Garrett said.