Arizona Police to Search Dump for Woman’s Body

For three days, Cookie Jacobson’s body apparently lay in a garbage can behind her home while her two children told police and neighbors they had no idea where she was.

It turns out her 16-year-old son, Aaron, may have known more than he let on.

Police suspect Aaron of killing his mother. But charges against him and his 13-year-old sister, Laura, may depend on whether authorities can find Jacobson’s body in the landfill where the garbage was dumped.

“The body’s going to do two things,” police spokesman Sgt. Dave Lind said. “It’s going to give us the cause of death. It’s going to either confirm or not confirm what the kids are saying.”

The children initially claimed they last saw their mother the morning of Sept. 21, when she scolded them for being late for school.

But Aaron later changed his story, telling investigators that he awoke to find his 49-year-old mother dead in bed, feared he and Laura would be blamed, and persuaded her to help him put the body in the trash.

Lind refused to discuss a motive. But police said comments Aaron made to his friends and investigators support their suspicion that he killed his mother.

A friend of Aaron’s told police that he “wanted to kill his mother, and his sister wanted to do something on her, too,” police said in court papers for a search warrant. Other acquaintances of Aaron told police he had bragged about having tried to kill his mother last year, once by poison and also by cutting the brake lines of her car.

Police plan to begin digging in a landfill by month’s end in hopes of finding the body. Blood found in the garbage can is also being tested to see if it matches Jacobson’s.

Aaron and Laura were arrested Oct. 1 after taking a polygraph test, but police released them a few hours later when prosecutors concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to charge them.