Cordell Farrington
Her Majesty’s Prison
Fox Hill
PO Box N-504
Nassau
Bahamas

charged with murdering four boys whose disappearances frightened people in the Bahamas, a country of islands set in azure waters popular with beach lovers and bone fishers.
Investigators who are just beginning to uncover macabre details say the quiet man kept cardboard boxes filled with human bones in his house.
“It’s just a hurt, a heartache for the nation,” said Ench Grant, a waitress on Grand Bahama island.
Farrington, 35, last week led police to skeletal remains buried in a secluded pine forest near Barbary Beach, a popular picnic spot on the island’s east end.
He is charged with the murders of Mackinson Colas, 11; Junior Reme, 11; DeAngelo McKenzie, 13; Desmond Rolle, 14; and Jamaal Robins, a 22-year-old he met at a drug rehabilitation center.
One friend said Farrington had a homosexual relationship with Robins and used to lure boys to his apartment, where he would pay them to work on art projects.
Others said he received Bible training in Jamaica and regularly watched television shows about crime-solving.
His ex-girlfriend, with whom he has a 3-month-old daughter, said he was protective of an art room where he would craft articles out of driftwood and conch shells. It was there he kept the cardboard boxes, she said Sunday.
“He used to say, ‘This is my room, and no one is to go in there,”‘ said the woman, who identified herself only as Dean.
She said they met at a gas station and started living together earlier this year, before the boys began to disappear in May.
Dean said Farrington had mentioned being abused as a child, but that he was a good father.
They parted last week, after she noticed he was losing weight and suspected he had started using cocaine again.
He turned himself in the same day.
“I was living with a serial killer and didn’t know,” Dean said. “He was so nice.”
After they separated, Farrington stored some belongings at her mother’s home, she said, including three sealed boxes left on the porch.
Those boxes contained bones separated into plastic bags, each labeled with a number, according to a police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Police told Robins’ family that one box held his rib bones, the victim’s mother, Patricia Scott, said.
Police said Monday they were working to identify a sixth body.
Another boy, 12-year-old Jake Grant, went missing in May. He reportedly drowned, and four other boys have been charged with manslaughter.
Farrington was not asked to plead in court last week. He is jailed pending a hearing Feb. 17. If convicted, he could be hanged.
It was at Sandilands Rehabilitation Center in Nassau, the capital on the Bahamas on New Providence island, that Farrington met Robins in 2003. Both were being treated for cocaine addiction.
Robins’ sister, Janet Cartwright, said Farrington seemed “obsessed with Jamaal” and that Robins saw him “as a kind of mentor.”
The two discussed the Bible, Cartwright said, and Farrington said he had studied at the Jamaica School of Bible Studies.
Once out of the clinic, both moved to Freeport, on Grand Bahama, where Robins helped Farrington with artwork that he promoted with cards titled “Pure Imagination.”
Farrington and Robins had a homosexual relationship, said a friend, Glen Reckley, 36. Farrington’s ex-girlfriend said she was unaware of it.
“Jamaal, he didn’t want anyone to know,” Reckley said.
In July 2002, Robins disappeared.
Investigators are trying to determine how Farrington came into contact with the boys, and Reckley speculated they might have been among those Farrington paid to help with his artwork.
About three months ago, Farrington became a stock clerk at a hardware warehouse about half a mile (0.8 kilometer) from the Winn Dixie supermarket where at least two of the victims packed groceries.
Supervisors described Farrington as a hard worker but one who took things too personally. A background check on him came up clean. A court document shows he changed his name in 2002 from Brennan, his mother’s name, to Farrington, his father’s.
Because of the common characteristics of the five murders with which Farrington is charged, police consider them the work of a serial killer, Assistant Commissioner Ellison Greenslade said Monday.
Police could not recall when last there was a serial killer in the Bahamas, a former British colony of 300,000 people that had 52 murders last year, up 17 percent from 2001.