On Saturday Maine police found the body of a small, blond, blue eyed boy wrapped in a blanket alongside a remote dirt road in South Berwick, Maine, near the New Hampshire border.
The child seemed to be well nourished and well cared for before he died. But police were puzzled because no one had come forward to report the tyke missing.
The story made the evening news across the country.
A tip was called into the police after a computer-generated image of the boy wearing a t-shirt with the words ‘Aviator Series’, was broadcast nationwide on Monday.
The mystery of the dead blond boy was solved on Wednesday when a state trooper approached a blue pickup truck at a highway rest stop two states away in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. The truck matched the description of a blue truck that was seen in the area where the body was found.
The woman inside the truck had a confession she wanted to get off her chest: “I killed my son. I want to kill myself,” she told the state trooper.
Julianne McCrery, 42, was placed under arrest. She had been sitting in her truck reading a bible when she was arrested.
The boy was identified by various media outlets as Camden Pierce Hughes, age 6, McCrery’s son.
McCrery, of Texas, told police that she had given Camden too much cough medicine. But an autopsy revealed the boy died of asphyxiation (suffocation).
Family and friends in Texas weren’t aware that McCrery had driven to Maine. They thought she was still in Texas. She has no relatives in Maine.
McCrery’s lawyer told the Boston Globe that McCrery “loves her son. He’s dead. He’s in heaven. She wants to be with him.” He added: “She said over and over again I want to go to heaven.”
This led to rampant rumors and speculation that McCrery, a bible thumping religious zealot, sacrificed her son in preparation for the rapture, which is predicted for Saturday, May 21. Friends believe that McCrery was swept up in the mass paranoia surrounding the predicted “end of days”, May 21st — and Camden was an innocent casualty of that hysteria.
Messages from friends left on McCrery’s facebook page and YouTube channel describe a deeply troubled woman who battled mental illness and substance abuse and had tried to kill herself several times.
She once wrote a book titled ‘Goodnight, Sleep Tight: How to Fall Asleep and Go Back To Sleep When You Wake Up’.
McCrery uploaded numerous videos of Camden to her YouTube channel, urgodsproblembaby (you’re God’s problem baby). She was described as a loving mother, but she seemed oddly detached from Camden emotionally.
Under a YouTube video of her son, titled ‘Tuxedo Kid‘, the caption read “blonde boy in tux.”
