Deputy United States marshals came to the rowhouse in the 4200 block of Sixth Street Southeast, in the Washington Highlands neighborhood, on January 9, 2008, to serve eviction papers. The electricity had been off for a long time. In two of the bedrooms they found the remains of four girls. Pathologists later concluded that they had been dead for at least seven months. Their mother, Banita Jacks, thirty-three, had been living in the house with them all that time.
Brittany Jacks was the eldest, sixteen by the Washington Post's account and seventeen by others. Tatianna Jacks was eleven. N'Kiah and Aja were six and five; their surname is spelled Fogle in most reports and Fogel in the Post. Jacks had kept the girls so cut off from the world that detectives could learn very little about them after their deaths. What they did learn, the prosecutor Deborah Sines told the court, came from sifting the filth of the house like archeologists, reading the children's drawings on the walls and scraps of paper. "All we can tell you is, they liked Dora the Explorer and, I think it was called, SpongeBob SquarePants," she said. "That's all we could find, and it came from a funeral program."
Jacks told police her daughters had died in their sleep, one after another, and that they were possessed by demons. The autopsies said otherwise. Brittany appeared to have been stabbed in the abdomen; the three younger girls had been beaten and strangled.
The girls had been out of school for months, and that was the part of the case the city could not get past. A school social worker had raised concerns about the family in 2007, and the Child and Family Services Agency had the case. Mayor Adrian Fenty fired six agency employees, saying they had failed to respond properly to the warnings; an arbitrator later ordered three of them reinstated. In April 2009 the District's Office of the Inspector General issued a report that spread the failure beyond the agency to other parts of the city government, and the Public Charter School Board adopted new truancy rules in the case's wake.
She was charged on twelve counts: premeditated first-degree murder, felony murder and first-degree cruelty to children for each girl. Her lawyers repeatedly urged her to let them raise an insanity defense, and she refused. She waived a jury, and the trial before Judge Frederick H. Weisberg of the D.C. Superior Court began on July 15, 2009. It lasted eight days. She did not testify.
On July 29 Weisberg, who said he had consulted no one, not even his clerk, during what he called a very lonely assignment, found her guilty on eleven counts. He acquitted her of the premeditated murder of Brittany alone, because he could not find beyond a reasonable doubt that the stab wounds were what killed her. The felony murder and cruelty convictions for Brittany stood. Jacks, walking with a cane, showed nothing as he read the verdict.
At sentencing on December 18, 2009, Sines asked for life without parole and said no relative had submitted a single victim-impact statement for the girls. The defense asked for thirty years on each murder, served concurrently, so that Jacks might one day be free. About a dozen members of her family sat in the gallery. The defense also challenged her earlier refusal of the insanity defense; Weisberg rejected that motion and the request for concurrent terms. He "could not conceive of any reason why" four deaths should earn one sentence, he said, "because each of these lives matters."
He declined life without parole only because four consecutive thirty-year terms would come to the same thing: 120 years, at least 102 even with mandatory credit for good behavior. Jacks declined to speak. Weisberg said the evidence photographs had intruded on his waking life nearly every day for the two years he had presided over the case and would probably haunt him for the rest of it.