OCEAN CITY — Police yesterday finished a three-day search of the property of a woman accused of hiding four dead fetuses, but planned to monitor the home to prevent retaliation against her relatives.
Investigators found no further human remains in the run-down home of Christy Freeman, 37, who is accused of causing her 26-week-old fetus to be stillborn last week.
Police searching for that fetus found the boy wrapped in a towel under Miss Freeman’s bathroom sink, plus two more sets of fetal remains wrapped in plastic in a bedroom trunk and a fourth in a Winnebago outside.
Police said they still don’t know whether the three additional sets of remains — all described as bones — belonged to Miss Freeman, or how or when they died, though all are thought to be pre-term babies.
Four investigators spent about three hours in the house yesterday morning, loading at least eight brown paper bags into an evidence van. Ocean City Police spokesman Barry Neeb said the bags contained potential evidence, but not human remains. He would not elaborate, but he said all items recovered were items police expected to see.
“Nothing they got was a surprise,” he said.
As the investigators untied crime tape around the house and loaded wheelbarrows into a large van, Mr. Neeb said the block a few hundred yards from the ocean was no longer a crime scene. Miss Freeman’s longtime boyfriend, Raymond W. Godman Jr., and their four children were free to return to the home.
By late afternoon, an unknown person had set up a roadside memorial on the family’s lawn — a small plastic angel and votive candle with a handwritten note in cursive script that read, “Pray all the unborn Children. Rest gently in the Arms of God.”
Mr. Neeb said officers on patrol would come by the house frequently until further notice for the family’s safety, noting that Miss Freeman’s reputed crime has unsettled folks in the beach resort that hasn’t seen a homicide in five years. Police said retaliation was the suspected motive in a case of vandalism earlier this week at the couple’s taxi business in West Ocean City, where four classic cars had windows broken.
Mr. Neeb said having an officer at the site was “the prudent thing to do, given the high-profile nature of this case.”
Miss Freeman was being held without bond in the Worcester County jail awaiting grand jury indictment proceedings that have not yet been announced. She is being represented by a public defender, Burton Anderson, who did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.
Mr. Godman has not been charged with a crime. Police said they have interviewed him, but they couldn’t share any explanations he might have given about Miss Freeman’s pregnancies.
Now investigators await word from the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office to prove the fetuses were Miss Freeman’s. “She says they are. We don’t have any reason to believe they’re not,” Mr. Neeb said.
The Medical Examiner’s Office told police that it was “conferring with other experts” and authorities should not expect any further results before at least next week, Mr. Neeb said. He told reporters that there is little police and the county prosecutor can do until a lab analysis reveals more about the fetuses and how and when they died.
“The search is finally done. Now begins all the follow-up,” he said.
The prosecutor, Worcester County State’s Attorney Joel J. Todd, told reporters Monday that authorities think Miss Freeman caused her baby to be stillborn last week. But he hasn’t talked to the press since then and refused comment yesterday through an aide about additional potential charges.
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