This already horrible case is getting more gut wrenching with every new development.
It was awful enough that missing 10-year-old Iliana “Lily” Peters was found dead, but every detail just made things more disturbing.
At first police warned the entire Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin community might be in danger, what with a child predator on the loose. But a Reddit commenter may have led police down a very different, more shocking path. Speaking about the case, the local said they had been “playing Pokemon Go in the park that day” near where the girl’s body was discovered. They wrote:
“My stomach turns when I think that I saw that girl in a pink/purple hoodie on her bike with another kid on my way out. I have a suspicion that it could be another kid that did it.”
Another kid. That comment was reported to police, who contacted the tipster — and did indeed end up arresting a child for the murder. Not only did the poor little girl know her killer, as police had revealed early on, the boy charged with the crime was another kid, a teenager of just 14 years old. And it wasn’t just murder…
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Chippewa County, Wisconsin District Attorney Wade Newell revealed on Wednesday that his office had filed charges of first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree sexual assault, and first-degree sexual assault of a child against a minor. This child had, according to the prosecutor, confessed to beating Lily with a stick before strangling her to death — and then sexually assaulting her. The DA said in court:
“He told law enforcement that his intention was to rape and kill the victim from the get-go when he left the house with the victim to go down the trail.”
The teenager was identified as C P-B, a moniker which made it all too easy to identify him as Carson Peters-Berger. Two shocking discoveries were then made.
First, it has been reported by multiple outlets that the shared Peters name is not a coincidence. Carson was not just known to the victim, his mother is Lily’s aunt, the one she never came home from visiting. He was her cousin.
The second realization was that the boy’s father is a convicted pedophile. Adam Berger (seen in his mugshot above, inset) went to prison in May 2018 for possession of child pornography. According to charging docs obtained by DailyMail.com, he was caught with a stash of photos of very young girls in states of undress. Ten of these photos were of a pornographic nature, focusing on the prepubescent girls’ exposed genitalia.
Berger was released from the Oshkosh Correctional Institution in April 2021 and is now on probation and living in a halfway house. According to Carson’s grandmother Mary, the boy has been withdrawn since the arrest:
“Carson has not been very happy with his father being gone.”
Was the boy’s mind warped by his father’s actions? Is there some hereditary component in this kind of sickness? Either answer is so tragic to consider.
This whole situation is so disturbing, from top to bottom. We can’t imagine it’s going to get better the more we learn…
[Image via Locate The Missing/Facebook/Chippewa Falls Police Department.]