DePetro.com has led the media on breaking news surrounding the ongoing investigation into the horrific death of 24-year-old Erica Bader. The nightmarish story began to unravel when details emerged revealing a level of severe abuse inside an apartment on Central Street in Central Falls that shocked even veteran detectives.

For weeks, Erica was held captive in what investigators described as a living house of horrors. Starved, isolated, and severely beaten with baseball bats and burned, she was kept in subhuman conditions. A neighbor recalled a heartbreaking scene prior to her death when Erica, desperate and starving, was seen crawling into a dumpster outside looking for leftover food scraps. Sources close to the investigation revealed she was routinely subjected to brutal beatings if caught trying to eat, whether it was food scraps, cat food, or dog food.

When Erica finally took her last breath, her tormentors set out to cover up the crime. They shaved her head and wiped down her body in an attempt to clean her, though the horrific extent of her physical injuries remained impossible to hide. Her jaw was broken, her left wrist was fractured, and her ear was nearly torn off.

In a clumsy attempt to deceive law enforcement, the suspects staged a note. They wrote a fake suicide note and tucked it directly into the waistband of her pajama pants.

They then loaded her body, wrapped inside a blanket, into a vehicle. Surveillance footage obtained by investigators captured the car arriving at a quiet, wooded area in neighboring Pawtucket. The video showed multiple suspects physically dragging her body out of the vehicle and dumping her in the brush about 100 feet off the road.

When responding detectives first arrived on the scene, they were horrified by the physical condition of her remains. One officer described her as being so emaciated that she looked like “something out of the history books, something you would see associated with the Holocaust.” Although the killers tucked the fake suicide note into her waistband to make it look like she walked into the woods and took her own life, investigators immediately saw through the lie. The catastrophic blunt-force trauma to her head, broken jaw, and shattered wrist made it clear to authorities from the very first moment that this was a brutal homicide.

The multi-agency investigation by Central Falls and Pawtucket police quickly led back to the Central Street apartment. A total of eight people were ultimately arrested and indicted by a Providence Grand Jury. Five core defendants—Andrew Cornell, Joshua Brunelle Arnold, Elizabeth Durand, Stephanie Bletzer, and Brittney Terpening—were charged with Murder, Kidnapping, and Conspiracy, and ordered held without bail as the horrifying surveillance and graphic evidence move through court. Three others face charges including kidnapping, conspiracy, and failure to report a death.