Philly man confesses in 2003 cold case after cops find woman’s remains in Kensington storage facility, prosecutor says

A Philadelphia man who allegedly confessed to fatally beating his girlfriend in central Pennsylvania was ordered held without bail Wednesday, two days after the woman’s dismembered body was found in a Kensington storage facility.

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Jade Gillette Babcock, 49, of Stella Street in Kensington, showed no emotion during a preliminary arraignment at which he was charged with abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence, and obstruction of justice in the death of his former girlfriend Brenda L. Jacobs.

Jacobs was 37 or 38 when she went missing in Lycoming County in December 2003. She was not reported missing by her family until 2013.

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Babcock lived in the central Pennsylvania county at the time of Jacobs’ disappearance. He was being held Wednesday at the 55th and Pine Streets police station and appeared at the hearing at the Stout Center for Criminal Justice via closed-circuit television.

Noting the alleged crimes would shock the average person, bail commissioner Kevin Devlin denied bail.

Anthony Voci, chief of the homicide unit in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, said that Lycoming County District Attorney Kenneth A. Osokow would soon charge Babcock with murder. Babcock was represented by a lawyer from the Philadelphia Public Defender’s Office.

Voci said the discovery of Jacobs’ remains and the arrest of Babcock resulted from information the defendant’s current girlfriend gave the State Police on Sept. 16. Babcock confessed Tuesday after being taken in for questioning, he said.

Babcock and Jacobs got into an argument Dec. 29, 2003, and he struck her on the head, Voci said. He declined to speculate on why Jacobs’ family had waited 10 years to report her missing.

“We would expect that the cause of death would be somewhere along the lines of a blunt force trauma. Forensically, I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to establish that,” Voci said after the hearing.

Police found Jacobs’ legless body inside a storage facility in the 3300 block of Frankford Avenue. A pair of legs found this spring in Montoursville, Lycoming County, are undergoing DNA tests to determine if they were Jacobs', Voci said.

For most of the time Jacobs was missing, her remains were hidden in a coal shed in Williamsport, and it is not clear when Babcock moved the remains to the storage facility, the prosecutor said.

Voci praised Babcock’s girlfriend for turning him in. “This is a really poignant example of, literally, one domino that falls and rapidly brings us to a conclusion of a very old and important case,” he said.

The case marks the third cold-case murder this year in which the Philadelphia DA’s Office has filed charges, Voci said. Earlier this month, Theodore Donahue was charged with murdering his girlfriend in 1991, and in March Charles Maitland was charged with killing his girlfriend in 1988.

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District Attorney Larry Krasner cited the efforts of State Police.

“When there is no swift resolution to an investigation, perpetrators do begin to believe that they can get away with murder,” Krasner said in a news release Wednesday. “With the help of our State Police, that won’t be true for Jade Babcock. May those who have been missing and mourning Brenda Jacobs for years know some peace in the very near future.”