A Maryland mother was held without bail Monday after Calvert County police found two of the woman’s three adoptive daughters chopped up and stored in a freezer.
The discovery was made after a neighbor found Renee Bowman’s third child, a 7-year-old girl, wandering the streets caked in mud, police said.
Bowman, 43, has admitted killing the girls seven months ago, according to police. That was shortly after she moved from Rockville to Calvert County.
All three of Bowman’s children were adopted while she was living in the District of Columbia, District officials said Monday.
The 7-year-old who escaped Bowman by jumping out the second-story window of their home on the 700 block of Buckskin Trail in Lusby was the biological sister of one of the girls, who was two years older.
The two sisters were adopted in 2004, while the other girl, age 11, was adopted in 2001, District officials said. Bowman received $2,400 a month from a federal program to care for the three girls.
According to court records, when the 7-year-old girl met with police Friday, her body was covered with infected sores, bruises and scars. The girl’s fingernails were blackened with blood and she showed signs of serious malnutrition. She told investigators her mother frequently beat her with a blood-soaked white shoe.
Montgomery County police and county school officials said Bowman and her three children had not popped up on their radar. None of the children was registered in the county school system and there had been no reports of abuse sent to police or social services, officials said.
When Calvert County investigators spoke with Bowman, she told them she regularly beat her living child and had placed the other two in a freezer, police said. On Saturday, deputies executing a search warrant discovered the two frozen bodies and a home that had fallen into disrepair.
“[It was] very nasty to say the least,” said Sheriff Mike Evans. “Fleas were in the house, feces, urine — terrible, terrible conditions.”
Montgomery police are constructing a timeline to determine if the killings happened in their county or Calvert. Anyone with information is asked to call 240-773-5070.
