Police Charge Elkridge Man In Wife's 1991 Murder; Body Found In Backyard Shed
ELKRIDGE, Md. (WJZ)-- A Howard County woman missing since 1991 is found buried just feet away from her home. Now her husband is under arrest.
Gigi Barnett has more on the gruesome discovery.
Howard County police say Robert Jarrett would never let them search his house even after he reported his wife missing years ago. This week, they got into his backyard and his wife isn't missing anymore.
In the backyard of the house on Clair Drive in Elkridge, police made a decades old discovery in the weather-beaten shed. They found the body of Christine Jarrett missing for 21 years.
"That is crazy," Robert Jarrett's neighbor Barbara Keir said. "There was rumors going around that she was in the pool back there."
All this time, she was under the floorboards of the shed, buried in concrete. Police say her husband did it. Back in 1991, he reported his wife missing. He told police then that Christine Jarrett walked away from their house one night after a heated argument never to be seen or heard from again.
"This was someone who was really cared about in the community," Sherry Llewellyn, spokeswoman for the Howard County Police Department, said. "She had a lot of friends and family members and she was someone that we never forgot about."
Police say they always suspected Robert Jarrett but never had enough evidence to charge him until this week when a tipster came forward.
"This was one of those cases where right from the very beginning, we knew that it sounded suspicious," Llewellyn said. "Neighbors and friends told us that this was a woman who would not have left her two small children."
Police were able to get into the shed this week when Robert Jarrett's current but estranged wife let them in. Detectives say they also found personal items on the body that looked like they belonged to Christine Jarrett.
"There was enough there to indicate to the investigators that this very likely is Christine," Llewellyn explained.
Some neighbors still remember Christine Jarrett well while others never imagined that she was always still on Clair Drive.
And while detectives are pretty sure that this body belonged to Christine Jarrett, they are not yet confirming that until they get a report from the medical examiner's office,
Robert Jarrett is being held without bond on first- and second-degree murder charges.
