Woman pleads guilty in Charlie Bell case
The second person accused of lying to deputies and hiding evidence in a 2011 homicide pleaded guilty to those crimes Monday afternoon.
Jennifer Freeman, 35, admitted to concealing evidence from Boone County investigators by lying to them about the disappearance of Charlie Bell, the Harrisburg man whose homicide remains unsolved. Judge Kevin Crane sentenced Freeman to six years in prison.
Sheriff’s deputies’ investigation of the homicide gained traction in 2014, when Freeman took investigators to Bell’s home, where she explained she witnessed someone shoot Bell in the garage on Route E. Freeman’s voice grew quiet in court as she pleaded guilty to cleaning the blood there.
Bell went missing in 2011, last seen on his motorcycle en route to Columbia. While the sheriff’s department considers Bell’s disappearance a homicide based on Freeman’s information and evidence found at the home, investigators have still not found Bell’s body.
44-year-old Patrick Curl pleaded guilty in July to taking the license plate off Bell’s motorcycle. He received a three-year prison sentence.
Also that month, Bell’s family released balloons in celebration of what would have been his 38th birthday. Bell’s family told ABC 17 News then that a $50,000 reward is still waiting for anyone with information about Bell’s death.
“There’s somebody out there, there’s more than one person out there that knows where Charlie is and what happened,” Bell’s father, Charles Bell, Sr., said.
