AUBURN, Maine -- Police held a mother and her boyfriend today on charges they stuffed the woman's screaming 4-year-old daughter into an oven and burned her to death, telling neighbors they were 'cooking Lucifer.'
'It's bizarre and the sickest thing I've ever seen,' said police Sgt. William Fourner.
Police, responding to reports of smoke billowing from the kitchen window Saturday, broke into the second-floor apartment minutes later and found the blistered body of Angela Palmer.
Neighbors said they heard the girl banging and yelling, 'Let me out, daddy, let me out' before officers arrived at the three-story tenement.
Police found the door to the electric oven jammed shut with a chair and the mother, Cynthia Palmer, 29, and her live-in boyfriend, John Lane, 36, sitting in the living room, authorities said.
Palmer and Lane carried bibles and chanted as they were led into Lewiston District Court today for arraignment. They entered no plea and Judge Damon Scales ordered the couple to undergo psychiatric tests before returning to court Nov. 20 for a probable cause hearing. Scales ordered them held without bail in Androscoggin County Jail.
A medical examiner said the girl, nicknamed 'Sweetpea,' died of extensive burns.
Another child, Sarah, 6, was uninjured and was turned over to the state Human Services Department.
Witnesses said religious music blasted from the apartment Friday night and Saturday and one neighbor said Lane threatened him with the 'wrath of God' when he complained.
When upstairs neighbor Mary Deraps, 21, smelled what she thought was burning hair Saturday afternoon, she knocked on the couple's door.
'I said, 'Is there something on fire? Is something burning in the oven?'' she said.
'Yes. I'm cooking Lucifer,' she quoted Lane as saying.
A neighbor passing by the apartment earlier in the day said Lane was overheard saying, 'Sweetpea is not a good girl. She's no good. We don't want her.'
As the couple and Palmer's other daughter were taken from the building, neighbor Julie St. Amand said she asked where Angela was.
St. Amand said Lane replied: 'Lucifer is gone. We killed her.'
'It's sad. We could have stopped it if we'd only called the police about an hour earlier,' another neighbor commented.
Following their arrest, police said the couple sat silently and refused to provide their names or ages.
Neither Palmer nor Lane were employed and had moved into the apartment about a month ago, residents said.