The accused then preserved the girl’s corpse for weeks in cat litter before dismembering and
dumping it in a remote area of north central Pennsylvania, USA, Weintraub said at a news conference.The teen had been reported missing last July and her remains were found by two hunters October 31 in a wooded area near a reservoir.
“Unfortunately, Grace Packer was a disposable child to these people,” Weintraub said of the girl who was taken in as a foster child at age three – and later adopted – by the woman now charged with killing her. “Who will now speak for Grace Packer? We will,” Weintraub said, casting the alleged crimes as a potential death penalty case.
Sullivan, 44, was arrested Saturday after stating to several workers at Abington Hospital-Jefferson Health that he was responsible for killing Grace. Under subsequent questioning by Bucks County detectives, he revealed in detail how the girl was assaulted and killed over the course of about 18 hours, according to an affidavit.
Petrucci denied bail for Sullivan and ordered him held at the Bucks County Correctional Facility pending a preliminary hearing January 20. About three hours later, Packer was arrested on charges of homicide, kidnapping, unlawful restraint, possessing instruments of crime, endangering the welfare of a child, abuse of corpse, simple assault, tampering with physical evidence, and conspiracy to commit rape and each of the above crimes. On the morning of July 8, 2016, Sullivan told detectives, he and Sara Packer drove Grace, still sleepy and in pajamas, from their residence in Abington to a new home in Richland Township, Bucks County. After they entered the house, Sullivan said, he struck Grace several times in her face, splitting her lip.
The two adults then took the teen to the third floor of the residence, where Packer watched as Sullivan raped her daughter. Packer then left to buy Tylenol PM and other drugs for sedating Grace. Telling her the drugs would help minimize her pain from the assaults, the adults gave her an overdose of pills, then bound and gagged her and left her to die in the hot attic, Sullivan said. Packer and Sullivan left the house for the rest of the day. Upon returning at 3am on July 9 and finding Grace still alive, Sullivan said, he strangled and suffocated her until she died. Packer and Sullivan then packed Grace’s body in cat litter to mask the odor and left it in the attic for three months. Weintraub, saying that Grace suffered terribly before dying, called her killing “a rape-murder fantasy that was shared by Jacob Sullivan and Sara Packer, and they acted it out.”
Three days after the killing, police said, Packer had filed a missing person report with Abington Township Police, saying her daughter had disappeared and likely had run away. Packer then allegedly withheld critical information and gave misleading statements to investigators working to find Grace, resulting in Packer’s arrest in November on charges of endangering the welfare of a child and obstructing the administration of law.
She is awaiting trial on those charges in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court. Two weeks before Grace’s body was found with its arms and legs removed, Packer was captured on video buying a bow saw and two extra blades at a tractor supply store in Richland Township, the probable cause affidavit says. A forensic anthropologist who examined the saw and Grace Packer’s body determined that the scarring and tool marks on her bones were made by an alternating tooth saw blade similar to that of the bow saw..
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