DARRINGTON, Wash. — A Darrington woman is in custody after police say she called 911 to report killing her young daughter days prior and burying her body in a neighbor's yard.
The woman told a deputy that voices in her head told her to kill herself and her 5-year-old daughter, probable cause documents show. She told deputies that she stabbed her daughter multiple times in the back seat of her vehicle on Feb. 14 and left the deceased child in the car for several days before eventually burying the child.
KING 5 is not naming the woman as she has not been formally charged with a crime in court. The woman was booked into Snohomish County Jail around 7 a.m. Tuesday on suspicion of first-degree murder. She appeared in court Wednesday and remains in jail on $5 million bond.
The woman called 911 on Feb. 26, telling the dispatcher that she killed her daughter with a knife and threw the knife into a dumpster four to five days later, according to probable cause documents. The woman told the dispatcher that she had been hearing voices and admitted to stabbing the child multiple times but did not know the exact number.
The dispatcher notes said a 26-year-old man replaced the woman on the phone with 911 and told them he had not seen her child since Feb. 14. He told the dispatcher that the woman dropped him off at work on that date with the child in the backseat. When she picked him up later that day, the woman apparently told the man that her mother had taken the child to California.
He added that the woman asked him to purchase a shovel for her a few days later. The woman told deputies that the child was left in the back seat of her car for several days hidden under blankets and that she only had buried the child because "she was afraid it was starting to smell," probable cause documents state.
The woman described the killing to deputies, saying that she had stabbed the young girl in the abdomen until she could see "intestines."
Detectives found the girl buried in a shallow grave, wrapped in a blanket with images from the Disney movie "Frozen."
"At first I didn’t believe it until seeing a whole squad of police here and at point, we knew it was serious. That’s when we came to the realization that something terrible happened here," said Nino Maltos, the Tribal chairman of Suak-Suiattle Indian Tribe.
The tribe owns the apartments where the killing occurred. Maltos said the woman arrested is not a member of the tribe.
"We didn’t see this coming, not from a long shot. You know, the individual involved is somebody who has barely been here a couple weeks. They were affiliated with one of our tribal members and I don’t even think that person could have anticipated anything like this happening," Maltos said.
Maltos and the other tribal members are heartbroken over the loss of the young child.
"I am more sad that this happened in a small town like this. Happened to this child and I can only imagine how the family of this child is feeling," Maltos said. "It’s a sad day all around in the town of Darrington."