Renee Bowman stored the frozen, garbage bag-wrapped bodies of her two adoptive daughters alongside packaged meat in her basement freezer for more than two years, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Bowman is on trial in Rockville, charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
In an opening statement, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy said Bowman abused her 9- and 11-year-old daughters for more than a year, beating them, choking them, locking them in rooms and forcing them to urinate in buckets before eventually strangling them to death. Police found their bodies duct-taped into the fetal position with yellow Styrofoam meat containers stuck to them, and entombed in a chest freezer at Bowman’s Calvert County home.
Bowman has already been sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to abusing a third adopted daughter, age 7. Police found the girl wandering the streets of Lusby caked in mud and blood, and a proceeding investigation of Bowman’s home turned up the bodies in the freezer in September 2008.
McCarthy presented autopsy photos of Jasmine’s and Minett’s frozen bodies covered in bruises. He noted that fingerprints found on the duct tape used to bind the victims matched Bowman’s.
“Both children were asphyxiated,” McCarthy said. “They died slow deaths. Not by natural causes. Not by accident. These were murders.”
McCarthy said that after killing the girls, Bowman attempted to feign a normal life. She regularly went out on dates. She alternately told curious friends that her daughters were staying with friends in the country, or that she had sent them to live in Connecticut, prosecutors said.
But Bowman’s attorney Ron Gottlieb urged the jury to weigh all of the evidence and said, “There is not enough evidence to convict Bowman of first-degree murder.”
According to police, Bowman transported the bodies of the two dead girls when she moved from Rockville to the Bryan Road area of Charles County before eventually settling in the Lusby home where police found them.
Child welfare advocates were shocked when they learned that District officials allowed Bowman to adopt the three girls despite a history of violence. In 1999, she was convicted of a misdemeanor for threatening physical violence against a 72-year-old man. Bowman filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
In January 2008, a Maryland Department of Human Resources caseworker responded to an anonymous call alleging child neglect at Bowman’s Charles County home. The caseworker found no evidence of abuse.
