7-year-old feared mom 'was going to kill her'

ROCKVILLE, Md. - One little girl is found roaming a neighborhood and tells police she'd been locked up and beaten, and that her two other sisters were "already gone."

When investigators got access to the Calvert County home, they say they discovered the frozen bodies of the little girls sisters stuffed into trashbags and left in a basement freezer.

That was September 2008.

Now, Renee Bowman, 44, of Lusby, appears in a Montgomery County courtroom to answer to the following charges: two counts of murder, three counts of child abuse and theft.

While she faces allegations of child abuse in Calvert County, she'll be tried on the murder counts in Montgomery County because investigators believe that's where the two girls, 7-year-old Jasmine and 9-year-old Minnet, died.

In the hearing, Bowman kept her head bent downward slightly, shifting heavily, foot to shackled foot, as she approached the defense table and sat quietly at the side of her defense attorney Paul de Wolfe.

State's Attorney John McCarthy and Assistant State's Attorney John Maloney outlined the charges against her, and Maloney told the judge, if an insanity defense -- the specific term is not criminally responsible -- was going to be filed, the prosecutors would want as much notice as possible and not a last-minute filing.

Asked about the charges, McCarthy told reporters he couldn't speak to the brutality of the case. He said the facts would be revealed more fully in trial, but he did say the charges speak for themselves.

"They were vulnerable kids. They were helpless, and I think everybody in the criminal justice system has a great deal of sympathy, and maybe taking for a little bit of responsibility at all levels, (is asking) how can we make certain these kinds of things don't happen again."

Bowman had adopted the girls in D.C. and was getting regular remittances for their care from the D.C. government. She's been charged with theft, because McCarthy says it's believed she kept collecting the benefits after the girls were dead.

Charging documents offer a chilling account of the girls' existence. The 7-year-old who was found roaming her Lusby neighborhood, told police she had jumped from her bedroom window, "fearing her mother was going to kill her."

The document explains a medical exam showed "extensive evidence of severe child abuse...to include infected sores, open legions (sic), fresh and old injuries to hear head, arms and legs."

When detectives searched the Lusby home, they opened a basement freezer.

"In the freer, encased in ice, was a trash bag that had a human form. A detective tore open the bag revealing a human toe," the documents say.

Later, according to the documents, Bowman told police the bodies of Jasmine and Minnet, were in the freezer.

A medical examiner would determine the cause of death for both girls was asphyxiation. The manner of death: homicide.

(Copyright 2009 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)