A Montgomery County jury found a 44-year-old woman guilty of murdering two of her adopted daughters and stuffing their small bodies in a freezer for more than a year.
It took the jury a little more than two hours to find Renee Bowman guilty on all counts: two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of first-degree child abuse. Bowman’s sentencing was scheduled for March 22.
John J. McCarthy, the state’s attorney for Montgomery County, prosecuted the case himself.
“This was abuse the likes of which I have never seen,” McCarthy said after the verdict. “It is beyond my comprehension how anyone could do this to children.”
Bowman has already been sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty in Calvert County to abusing her third adopted daughter, the girl who escaped and led authorities to the horrible discovery.
Police found two of her girls’ bodies duct taped in the fetal position with yellow Styrofoam meat containers stuck to them, and entombed in a chest freezer at Bowman’s Calvert County home.
Police said Bowman carried the bodies of Minnet Bowman, 9, and Jasmine Bowman, 7, in a freezer for more than a year as she moved from Rockville to Charles County, where police found them entombed in a block of ice.
Their bodies were discovered in Sepember 2008 after the youngest girl jumped from her bedroom window and was found wandering the streets, covered in bruises and blood.
The surviving daughter, now 9, testified last week that her “ex-mother” kept the sisters in a locked room and forced the them to urinate in a bucket. Bowman repeatedly beat them with a baseball bat and a shoe, the girl said.
“One of the saddest things is that the abuse of these three girls went unseen for so long,” McCarthy said.
In January 2008, a Maryland Department of Human Resources caseworker visited Bowman’s Charles County home in response to an anonymous call alleging child neglect, the agency said in a statement. Bowman was living under a false name and the caseworker found no evidence of child abuse.
The District of Columbia allowed Bowman to adopt the girls despite a bumpy personal history, including a 1999 conviction for threatening physical violence against a 72-year-old man. District officials said the city paid her more than $152,000 to care for the girls.
