Tortured and then dumped in the sea … just because she forgot to say 'sir' and 'please'

Published on Monday 26 January 2009 21:05

SHE was just two years old when she committed the "crime" that was to cost her her life; forgetting to say "please" and failing to address her stepfather as "sir".

By the time her corpse washed up on an uninhabited island off Texas, her features were decayed beyond recognition and her pink skirt and cardigan hung in shreds. Police dubbed the anonymous child Baby Grace as they struggled to find her killers.

Today, 15 months after the mystery of Baby Grace captured headlines, the little girl's mother will go on trial in Galveston, Texas, accused of her murder.

The hearing represents the culmination of an extraordinary investigation in which Lois Gibson, who is noted in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most successful forensic artist, put a face – and ultimately, a real name – to Baby Grace after spending just three minutes with her body in the morgue.

Ms Gibson sketched an image of the girl's face that proved uncannily precise, enabling a relative of the dead girl to recognise it on television. Finally, Baby Grace had a name – Riley Ann Sawyers, from Mentor, Ohio.

"I knew I had to do this right for that little girl," Ms Gibson said at the time. "I only get one chance and I want to help helpless victims. How much more helpless can you be when you're two and you're dead?"

The Baby Grace story first came to attention in October 2007, when a fisherman found her remains wrapped in bin bags inside a plastic container off Galveston's shoreline. Her skull was fractured in three places.

Ms Gibson was able to tell from the remains how the dead girl might have grinned, the angle of her eyebrows, the size of her eyelids, and to create a sketch for police to release.

Four weeks after the remains were found, police arrested Kimberley Trenor, a 19-year-old from Ohio, whose mother had tipped off police after recognising the image of Baby Grace as her missing granddaughter Riley Ann.

Trenor spilled a confession detailing a horrific six-hour torture session in which she and her husband Royce Ziegler, 25, had "disciplined" the girl for failing to address him properly by thrashing her with leather belts and repeatedly holding her head under water in the bathtub.

She was also held face down in a pillow on her bed, and on the cushions of a sofa.

Ziegler then picked up the toddler by her hair and hurled her across a room, causing her head to slam into the tiled floor, Trenor's arrest affidavit claims.

After the girl had stopped breathing, they bought bleach, rubber gloves, concrete mix, a shovel, a plastic container and padlocks. Her body was stored for up to two months before it was hurled into Galveston Bay.

Trenor and Ziegler both face life without parole if convicted for murder. Trenor denies the charge, but admitted to tampering with evidence by helping to dispose of the remains.

While in custody, Trenor gave birth to a baby boy, who is now in the care of relatives. Her daughter, meanwhile, will be remembered with a cross that will be erected on the tiny strip of land on which her remains were found – and which has now been renamed Riley's Island.