by Staff writer
The mother of a girl who was raped, murdered and dismembered has testified in court that she helped plot the attack and carry it out.
With a sinister smile, Sara Packer calmly recounted how she watched her boyfriend sexually assault her 14-year-old daughter, Grace, then strangle her in a hot attic outside Philadelphia.
She said Grace looked at her as she was being choked to death, and Sara Packer took her hand and told her it was “OK to go.”
“Grace had become, for lack of a better word, a non-entity,” Sara Packer said in a monotone.
“She just didn’t exist anymore. I wanted her to go away.”
Sara Packer’s testimony came at a sentencing hearing for her boyfriend, Jacob Sullivan, who pleaded guilty to rape, first-degree murder and other offenses in Grace’s death.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Sullivan while Sara Packer has agreed to plead guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for a life sentence.
On Wednesday, she told the jury that her daughter was a discipline problem — a “very difficult child” —and she wanted her dead.
She admitted she hated Grace, shared a rape-murder fantasy with Sullivan, and helped hack up her daughter’s body and dispose of it months later.
