The mother of a Pennsylvania teen who was viciously raped, murdered, and dismembered has reportedly admitted to helping plan the girl’s murder and being present to watch.
In a Wednesday court proceeding, Sara Packer shockingly testified that she urged her boyfriend, Jacob Sullivan, to rape and murder 14-year-old Grace Packer because she was “a difficult child,” according to the Associated Press.
Packer, who adopted the girl in 2007, said in court that she told her daughter, “I can’t help you anymore” as Sullivan was raping her. She also insisted she told the girl it was “OK to go” as Sullivan was strangling her to death.
“Grace had become, for lack of a better word, a non-entity,” Sara Packer blankly recounted. “She just didn’t exist anymore. I wanted her to go away.”
Doylestown resident Jacob Sullivan has pleaded guilty to rape, first-degree murder, and other offenses, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. But Packer has agreed to plead guilty to the crime in exchange for life in prison.
Prosecutors said that Packer and Sullivan first tried to dose the girl with a bottle of over-the-counter medication and then placed her in a hot attic to die. Instead, the girl was able to get out of some of the bindings the killers put on her.
Grace was unable to escape the house, though, before Sullivan grabbed her again, prosecutors said. It was then that Sullivan strangled the girl.
The pair left the child’s body in cat litter for several months before cutting it up and dumping the segments in a remote area, where hunters discovered them in October 2016.
There were some hints that things was not right in the Packer household.
Sara and her former husband, David Packer, had been a foster family and cared for dozens of children. The Packers adopted Grace in 2007 during that period. But in 2010, David Packer was sent to prison for sexually molesting one of the children, and Sara lost her job as a Northampton County adoptions supervisor.
Unfortunately, Grace was not removed from Packer’s custody.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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