A daughter from Maryland who said she saw her mother kill her grandmother testified that the defendant cut up the body parts with a chainsaw, burned them on a grill, and then started a small fire that neighbors put out before firefighters arrived.
The 46-year-old Candace Craig is being tried for killing her 71-year-old mother, Margaret Craig.
According to WDCW, the defendant’s 21-year-old daughter Salia Hardy, who is charged with being an accessory after the fact to murder, testified against her mother on Wednesday as part of a plea deal with prosecutors.
Margaret Craig was killed at her home near Hyattsville, a suburb of Washington, D.C., on May 23, 2023.
Hardy is said to have said in court that she heard her grandmother scream and that her mother told her not to go into her grandmother’s room because something had fallen in the basement.
When she got home alone the next day, she went into the room and saw her grandmother’s body in a trash can with a trash bag over her head.
Hardy said that Candace Craig told her daughter that they had to “use acid, burn the boy, or chop it up” to get rid of the DNA, but she did not tell her daughter what happened to her grandmother.
A few days later, Craig bought grilling supplies at Home Depot, including a can of gasoline. She then started to burn her mother’s body on the grill, trying to hide the smell by cooking chicken at the same time.
However, she started a fire, which caused neighbors to come over and help put out the flames and call the fire department, Hardy said. But the body was not found at that time.
Hardy told the jury that the mother and daughter brought the bodies back inside in the morning after “having time to cool off.”
Craig used a chainsaw in the basement to cut up her mother, her daughter said in court. The bodies were found in trash bags, according to the police.
The Prince George’s County Police Department said in a press release that the bodies were found when officers went to the home on June 2 to check on Margaret Craig’s welfare after getting a 911 call saying he had not talked to her in a few days and was worried about her.
Police said that Candace Craig answered the door and let patrol officers into the house to look for Margaret Craig. “As soon as the police officers walked into the basement, they could smell the smell of death.”
Law&Crime said before that police saw blood and tissue on the ground near three white plastic trash bags. One had something that looked like brain matter. The police also said they found a knife and a chainsaw with body parts on them in the basement.
According to a report from local Fox affiliate WTTG, Maryland Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Pamela Ferreira said that investigators found 67 pieces of the body but not all of it.
There were signs that the body parts had been burned and cut up with a mechanical saw. The news source said the death was ruled a murder by unknown means.