Mystery of Mummified Babies-Solved

October 23^rd, 2003 started much the same as any other day for Deena Roberts. The only difference was that today Deena was waiting for the electrician to arrive. Deena and her husband, Stephen, were remodeling the A-frame home, near Bangs Texas, that they had purchased three years earlier.

Upon the arrival of the electrician, Deena led him upstairs to point out the location of some wiring when she noticed a door at the back of the crawlspace she had never noticed before.

After opening the door, she made a terrifying discovery: The bodies of three mummified infants swaddled tightly in sheets and wrapped in a plastic garbage bag. The Roberts, who were never suspected in the case, called the Brown County Sheriff's Department and told them that they had found the remains of a dead baby between their walls.

Chief Deputy, Mike McCoy was the first officer on the scene. McCoy recalls pulling back some of the layers of cloth and paper to reveal a tiny leather-like baby. The case was then immediately turned over to Texas Ranger Nick Hanna (who is also working on the Amanda Goodman murder) and Brown County Sheriff's detective Scott Martin.

The bodies were then sent to the Travis County Medical Examiner's office in the hopes of identifying the infants' cause of death. Dr. Robert Bayardo was able to ascertain that one of the babies was male (the sex of the other two babies could not be determined) and that the remains were between 30 and 40 years old.

After these initial findings the babies were then sent to University of North Texas Health Sciences Center Forensic Anthropology lab in Denton, Texas were they remain to this day as evidence.

The next step for investigators was to find out to whom the babies belonged. Luckily, they had already been developing a theory: James and Doris Bowling, who had built the Bangs, Texas A-frame in 1987, were the parents of the mummified infants.