A horrible story

The smiles radiate from photos posted online by friends: Grace Packer sporting an impish grin as a toddler, floating happily in a pool as a young teen, leaning in to talk to a friend at her school lunch table.

But the 14-year-old posted a more haunting picture, a forlorn selfie taken in a dimly lit room, when she opened a Facebook account last year and invited people to comment on it. No one did.

At the time, police believe, Grace’s adoptive mother and the mother’s boyfriend were plotting to kill her.

A little later in the story:

Yet she had endured a lifetime of pain and loss, from sex abuse allegations that led her birthparents to lose custody when she was 3, to the indecent assault that sent her adoptive father to prison when she was 10, to the unimaginable rape-murder fantasy that prosecutors say led Sara Packer and boyfriend Jacob Sullivan to kill Grace in July.