The unspeakable horror inflicted on Grace Packer

Ever wonder if there really is true evil in the world?

Meet Sara Packer, and her lowlife boyfriend Jacob Sullivan.

Then try to come to grips with what police say they did to Packer’s adopted 14-yearold daughter Grace.

Sara Packer, 41, and Sullivan, 44, now stand charged in the horrific murder of young Grace, which is being described by authorities as some sort of perverted rapemurder fantasy cooked up by these two so-called adults.

We have trouble referring to them as adults; actually after reading about what they are charged with doing, it’s hard to describe them as human.

Bucks County authorities allege that young Grace was beaten, tortured and raped last summer.

Finally, Sullivan is believed to have strangled the teen.

Then her remains were stored in kitty litter in the attack of the Quakertown farmhouse where they lived to throw off investigators. Nice.

But Sara Packer and Sullivan had a problem. The questions about Grace’s disappearance – and what Sara and Sullivan knew about it – would not go away.

When the couple believed the cops were growing increasingly suspicious about what happened, they allegedly decided they needed to take further action.

Police now say they dismembered Grace’s body in a bathtub before dumping her body parts 75 miles away in the woods of Luzerne County in upstate Pennsylvania.

Grace was first reported missing July 11. Her remains were found by hunters on Halloween.

Sara Packer was initially identified as a “person of interest” in the case of her adopted daughter’s disappearance.

At the time, police asked the public to come forward with any information in the puzzling disappearance.

But Sara Packer and Sullivan apparently had other plans.

Police say they concocted some kind of suicide pact by taking an overdose of pills.

A roommate found them and both survived, which is more than can be said of the grisly fate they allegedly inflicted on little Grace.

While he was in the hospital, it is believed Sullivan allegedly confessed to his part in the girl’s killing.

Now both Sara Packer and Sullivan are facing murder charges.

The question is why? What could possibly drive someone, in this case an adoptive mother, to take such action totally bereft of any human feeling?

Bucks County District Attorney Matthew D. Weintraub did not mince words in describing what happened to Grace Packer, painting it as “heinous,” “depraved” and “unspeakable.”

The veteran lawman, himself the daughter of girls, was clearly shaken in detailing what he described as some kind of rape-murder fantasy.

Weintraub noted the case “shakes one’s belief in the goodness of humanity.”

Actually, it does much more than that, none of it good.

Weintraub specifically wondered how any mother could do this to a child.

“I’m bereft,” he said. “I don’t have an answer.” We do. The answer is there isn’t one.

Sometimes, you just shake your head.

The danger is to allow any sliver of this to be normalized.

This isn’t normal. What Sara Packer and Jacob Sullivan are charged with doing cannot be explained. It simply has to be dealt with.

That is why we have institutions such as our criminal justice system, to deal with miscreants who are capable of the kind of actions that these two now are charged with.

But it also now must do something else.

It has to speak for Grace Packer.

“She never had a chance with these people,” Weintraub said at a Sunday press conference.

“The question is, ’Who will speak for Grace Packer, this forgotten child?’

“We will,” the D.A. proclaimed. Actually, we all will. Or risk all of us descending into something less than human.