Daughter pleads guilty in 100-year-old mother's abuse death

BELLEFONTAINE, Ohio — Mary Strawser has never said why she neglected her own mother for years, why she didn’t feed her or clean her or ever even get the 100-year-old woman the medical attention she so clearly needed as a slow and painful death crept closer.

But Strawser admitted today for the first time that she did, in fact, let Blanche Cowen suffer and die on a ratty old couch, emaciated, dehydrated and covered in her own filth.

Strawser, 77, pleaded guilty in Logan County Common Pleas Court to felony charges of reckless homicide and theft from an elderly person. She had originally been charged with involuntary manslaughter but Prosecutor William T. Goslee said even though she is pleading to a different charge, he will still argue that Strawser be sent to prison.

“She should not get a free pass,” Goslee said. “I’ve never seen a worse case of elder abuse and neglect. Not ever.”

Judge Mark S. O’Connor allowed Strawser to remain free on bond until she is sentenced on May 4. She faces as many as six years in prison.

Cowen had been kept for years in a dilapidated house trailer about 15 feet away from Strawser’s nearly 1,400-square-foot, well-maintained house on 20 acres in rural Rushsylvania. Authorities found her dead on the dirty couch on March 10, 2014, after Sonny Ray Scott, a mentally-disabled man Strawser had allowed to live there, called 911 to say Cowen wasn’t breathing.

The coroner said Cowen died of dehyradation, a urinary tract infection and infection from untreated bedsores the size of footballs, some so deep that her bones were exposed. But those medical explanations don’t really convey the condition that Cowen had been left in for years. Her adult diaper hadn’t even been changed in probably a year and had mostly rotted away, said Mike Brugler, a detective with the Logan County sheriff’s office.

The photographs of her condition were so graphic that prosecutors say they will show them to O’Connor in his private chambers rather than in open court before Strawser is sentenced. And moreover, Goslee said, an autopsy showed that internally, Cowen otherwise would have been in remarkable health for a women her age and friends who had spoken to her on the phone over time said she never lost her faculties. Which all means she suffered a great deal as her body slowly decayed and wasted away, Goslee said.

Assistant Prosecutor Sarah Warren said that as Strawser was living on her mother’s monthly $650 Social Security check for the last few years — shopping, eating out and even going to the doctor herself — Cowen hadn’t seen a doctor since she broke her foot in 2008. Relatives were kept away after that, and it appears the last time Cowen was moved from the couch was a year before her death in May 2013, when Strawser and Scott dragged a kiddie pool into the living room and “bathed” her and took her to a gathering for her 100th birthday..

Strawser had allowed Scott to stay with her mother rent-free in exchange for helping with her care. But he was barely able to care for himself. He was in poor health and had a low-functioning IQ. He had faced the same charges as Strawser for Cowen’s death, but he died of a heart attack in December in the same run-down trailer where Cowen died. He was 66.

Today, as Warren read through the graphic nature of Cowen’s condition, Strawser just shook her head no. In answer to the judge’s questions, Strawser said she’d only completed the 10th grade in school and had once worked at a factory in Kenton. Otherwise, she said nothing on her own behalf. Her attorney, William F. Kluge, said he expects to present her side of the story at sentencing.

Warren said Scott’s death complicated matters and played a role in allowing Strawser to plead to a lower-degree felony charge. Her age, and the question of whether she would even get more prison time with the original charge, also factored in.

But Warren agrees with Goslee that prison is appropriate. She said Strawser’s neglect of her mother appeared not only to be motivated by money but also by hatred.

“Distant relatives have said that Mary Strawser was just not a nice person,” Warren said. “They say she had always treated her mother badly.”

Goslee said he hopes the case sends a message to others: “If you assume the duty of care of an elderly person ... and if you fail, if you neglect their needs, you can and will be criminally charged.”

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Daughter pleads guilty in 100-year-old mother's abuse death