LITTLE ROCK — The Pulaski County sheriff ’s office Tuesday tentatively identified the human remains found in a burning pickup stuck in the mud Saturday near Sweet Home as a 28-year-old county man and his daughter, just about to turn 2.
Sheriff’s office spokesman John Rehrauer said Michael Palmer and his daughter, Hannah Grace Dowdie, had not been seen since Saturday. The bodies, found burned beyond recognition on dead-end Wilbern Road near Granite Mountain Quarries, were in a small GMC truck registered to Palmer, Rehrauer said.
Palmer’s body was in the bed of the truck. Hannah’s was in the cab.
Rehrauer said medical information from Monday morning autopsies - he declined to specify what - helped investigators make their preliminary identifications.
“We still have to wait on DNA evidence to be sure,” he said.
But, he said, the sheriff’s office was confident enough in the identities to announce them.
Pulaski County Coroner Garland Camper said this case was the first in his 23 years of investigating deaths in Arkansas that a law-enforcement agency has released tentative identifications.
“It’s ridiculous to me,” he said. “They are way overstepping. As far as I’m concerned, until we get back the DNA and the final identification, it’s my position that these individuals have not been identified. How big of a mistake would it be to get the final identification and to learn these are not the right people?”
Hannah was the first baby born in Pulaski County in 2008. Her mother, Kayla Dowdie, 21, did not reply to a message seeking comment.
Saline County court records show that Dowdie burned her daughter with a cigarette in April last year, then called police and said a stranger did it. When a Saline County sheriff’s deputy asked her about it, however, Dowdie confessed.
“I did it,” Dowdie told the deputy, according to the court records. “I burned her. I need help.”
Child-welfare workers took custody of Hannah after her release from a hospital, according to the court records.
Dowdie pleaded guilty to second-degree battery and filing a false police report and was sentenced in August 2008 to six years’ probation.
Investigators have not shared publicly the causes of death for Palmer and Hannah, saying only that they are classified as homicides and that officers are saving further information to better discern a suspect.
“We have an ongoing investigation,” Rehrauer said. “We need to preserve as much as we can to find who did this.”
The sheriff’s office asked anyone with information about the case to call its anonymous Crime Stoppers tip line, (501) 340-8477.
Information for this article was provided by Ginny LaRoe of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 12/16/2009