Police body camera videos show the chilling confession of an Ohio foster mother accused of killing 5-year-old Darnell Taylor in February and stuffing his body in s sewer drain in February.
Last month, a judge ruled that Pammy Maye, the boy’s legal guardian, was competent to stand trial on charges that include aggravated murder, tampering with evidence, and abuse of a corpse, as CrimeOnline reported.
Taylor was reported missing on February 14 when Maye’s husband called 911 to report his wife acting strangely — and that she’d told him the boy was “no longer alive.Investigators found her the next day in Brooklyn, a suburb of Cleveland, where authorities had earlier found her abandoned car, and took her to a hospital for an evaluation.
While there, she confessed to the murder. Detectives asked her if the boy was still alive.
“No, there isn’t,” she said from her hospital bed. “And I did it.”
WBNS said it obtained 30 vidoes from the Brooklyn Police Department of Maye’s arrest. In them, she told investigators she was upset because Tayler was eating snacks in bed, which made her angry enough to plan his murder. She described to the detectives how she suffocated him in his bed, then put his body in a closet.
After her husband came home and went to bed, she took the child’s body and drove around looking for a place to dispose it — after she put an old license plate over her vanity plate to make it harder to track her. She told detectives she put the boy in a “manhole” on Marsdale Avenue and went back home, according to WLWT, which also obtained the videos.
There, she woke up her husband and told him she had something serious to tell him. He made the 911 call at about 3 a.m., telling dispatchers he searched the home before calling and couldn’t find the boy. Maye told police she tried to stop him from calling 911 because she wanted to explain what happened, telling him she “had a plan.”
She left the house before police arrived, driving north toward Cleveland, she said, because it was a route she knew.
“The only reason I fled in the nightgown was because I didn’t want the police to come and interrogate me and I wanted to tell my husband and he wasn’t listening,” Maye said.
Maye showed very little remorse during her confession, although she did say once that it was “sad.”
Officials issued an Amber Alert for Taylor but cancelled when they found his body where Maye said it would be.
Maye’s attorney, Sam Shamansky, told WBNS he hadn’t seen the videos but that he didn’t consider the videos proof “of her mental state at the time of the commission of the offense,” indicating she will lake change her not guilty plea to not guilty by insanity.
Maye is due in court again on April 25.
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[Featured image: Pammy Maye and Darnell Taylor/Ohio Amber Plan]
