posted October 08, 2004 01:49 AM         

Investigators unsure how possible human remains got inside insulation

BY MELANIE BENNETT

Staff Writer

A Russell County fifth-grader is convinced bones found in her home last weekend belong to a mysterious friend who told her about being chopped up years ago.

Investigators have few clues about how and when the bones got inside insulation under the living room floor of the mobile home on Jowers Road, near East Alabama Motor Speedway.

The 10-year-old, Stephanie Ogden, and her family have lived in the home since 1998. Her great-grandparents, John and Marion Stewart, own the home.

The bones were found Saturday as the Ogdens, who are renovating the home, pulled up boards in the living room floor. Russell County Sheriff's Lt. Heath Taylor said an initial analysis shows the bones are from the pelvis and leg of a child at least 10 years old, and the child has been dead at least 10 years.

Another bone was found Sunday, Marion Stewart said. The area where the bones were found had duct tape over the insulation, Stewart said.

"There's an odor there that doesn't belong," Stewart said.

The bones probably don't have enough marrow to do DNA tests, Taylor said. Because the trailer has been moved several times between Georgia and Alabama, investigators now are faced with the daunting task of trying to track down missing children from a wide area in two states.

Taylor said gnaw marks on the bones may indicate a rodent placed them inside the insulation. Dirt and plant material on the bones indicate they were outside at one time, Taylor said.

Stephanie said a black girl in a white dress started visiting her room when she was about 5 years old. The girl was friendly, but she told Stephanie a horrible story.

"She told me that somebody put her in the floor," Stephanie said. "She said he had a mask on, and that he chopped her up. She didn't know who the person was, because he had a mask on."

Stephanie, a fifth-grader at Dixie Elementary School, now thinks that the bones that were found in her home belong to her playmate.

"It's possible because that girl was a ghost," Stephanie said Monday. "Nobody knows about them."

Marion Stewart said Stephanie used to tell her family about the visitor, but the adults always dismissed the stories as being an imaginative child's fabrication based partly on horror movies. Stewart said Stephanie used to always ask for two glasses of soda when she would play outside -- one glass for her and one for her friend.

Stewart said the weekend's grisly discoveries have convinced her that her great-granddaughter's playmate is actually a tormented soul seeking peace.

"I'm not a psychic, and I don't believe in some of that stuff," Stewart said. "But I believe this is a soul who has not been put to rest."

Taylor said detectives can't base their work on ghost stories.

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to investigate a ghost?" he said Monday.

Investigators are looking through databases of missing children to find any links to the trailer's location, but Taylor doesn't hold out much hope of solving the case.

"It's just one of those cases where there's just not a lot to go on," he said.

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