A D.C. police detective recalled finding the “mummified” bodies of Banita Jacks’ four daughters rotting upstairs in her otherwise empty Southeast home that he said, during a hearing Monday, smelled “like death.”
Banita Jacks, 35, is charged with killing the four girls, who ranged in age from 5 to 17. Their bodies were found Jan. 9, 2008, when U.S. Marshals entered her home to carry out a routine eviction. The girls had been dead for at least seven months when authorities found them, said Darryl Richmond, one of the lead detectives on the case.
Superior Court Judge Frederick H. Weisberg denied a motion from Jacks’ attorney Monday to delay the trial until last-minute DNA evidence from the crime scene was processed.
Weisberg is now considering another motion from the defense to suppress an eight-hour recording of police interrogations. The judge watched the interrogations privately Monday afternoon, and he is expected to hear opening arguments Tuesday.
At the crime scene, Richmond said he found Jacks’ three youngest children lined up next to one another — in sequence by size — in an upstairs bedroom and their heads were uniformly turned to one side.
“It was a real foul odor,” Richmond said, recalling how severely decayed the children’s bodies were.
In a nearby closet, Richmond found the fourth and oldest child along with a knife and a pile of human excrement. He suggested the fourth child may have been victim of a hostage situation. But Jacks’ attorney, Peter Krauthamer, said the walls of her town home on the 4200 block of Sixth Street SE are “paper-thin” and neighbors never reported hearing anything out of the ordinary.
Krauthamer pressed Richmond for evidence proving the girls’ deaths were homicides.
Richmond said he found a T-shirt wadded up and duct-taped under the door to the bedroom where the three youngest children were found, indicating someone was trying to mask the smell.
“I believe if it was a natural death, [Jacks] wouldn’t have been trying to hide the bodies,” Richmond said.
Police said Jacks told them during initial investigations that the girls were “possessed with demons” and that they died in their sleep “one at a time” over the course of 10 days. She likened her oldest daughter to Jezebel, a particularly wicked Biblical character, investigators said.
Through her attorney, Jacks requested that the interrogation tapes not be played in open court and that she not be required to be present during the viewing. She also requested that Weisberg, who is deciding the case without a jury, “pay close attention to everything that is said and how it is said,” Krauthamer said.