Left: Madison Marshall (Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department). Inset: Oaklee Snow (IMPD). Right: Roan Waters (Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office).
Prosecutors in Indiana announced this week that a man will not face trial for the death of a 1-year-old girl, whose body was discovered inside a dresser at an abandoned home.
According to a plea agreement obtained by Law&Crime, 27-year-old Roan Waters will admit guilt to one charge of neglect of a dependent resulting in death, and two additional counts of neglect of a dependent, in connection to the death and endangerment of Oaklee Snow.
The agreement will take other and more serious crimes off the table.
In March 2023, Waters was arrested at a hotel in Colorado on a bench warrant from Oklahoma. He initially faced myriad charges — including counts of murder, neglect of a dependent resulting in death, neglect of a dependent resulting in serious injury, battery resulting in bodily injury to a person under 14, and neglect of a dependent.
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On May 22, Waters signed the plea agreement offered by the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office. The judge accepted the plea on Wednesday and the defendant will be sentenced on June 13.
Waters was previously scheduled to begin trial on May 12 and faced the prospect of Oaklee’s mother, Madison Marshall, testifying against him.
In January 2023, Oaklee, just shy of 2 years old at the time, was spirited away from Oklahoma to Indianapolis along with her 7-month-old brother. Prosecutors alleged Marshall and Waters were the culprits. Both children were reported missing by their father, Zachary Snow.
Snow told investigators with the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in Oklahoma that Marshall and Waters took his boy and girl from their home on Jan. 19, 2023, without his permission before fleeing to Indiana, where they would be staying with Waters’ mother.
Somewhere along the way, however, and under still murky circumstances, the young girl was killed and her body was hidden.
While the young boy was eventually reunited with his father after being found abandoned in what authorities described as a “trap house,” common terminology for a house dedicated to illicit drug use, it would be months before Oaklee’s body was recovered.
A national search for the 2-foot-tall, 35-pound, blonde-haired and blue-eyed girl culminated in late April 2023 when Marshall, in custody, led authorities to an abandoned Morgantown house where Oaklee’s tortured and broken body had been stuffed into a dresser.
Marshall told investigators Waters would regularly “whoop” Oaklee as a form of discipline for any perceived misbehavior, including “holding a fork wrong,” urinating in her diaper, and many other behaviors common to toddlers. On several occasions, the man also allegedly “choked her out,” according to a probable cause affidavit.
She also apparently told investigators that Oaklee had stopped eating around Waters because “he regularly became aggressive with her when she would not eat at the pace that he wanted her to,” police said.
Marshall told detectives the fatal day was Feb. 9, 2023.
The girl’s mother said she heard Waters in the living room repeatedly yelling at Oaklee to bounce on an inflatable rubber ball with a handle. After the “fifth and loudest time that he yelled at her,” Marshall went in to check on them and said she saw Waters “standing over Oaklee as she sat trying to bounce on the ball,” according to the affidavit.
Marshall said she saw Waters sit on the couch while she went back to the kitchen. Minutes later, she said she heard Waters scream for her daughter, saying she “never heard sound like that before.”
“She met him in the hallway as he held Oaklee in his arms,” the affidavit reads. “She saw that Oaklee was not moving. R. Waters continually repeated without prompting that he ‘didn’t do anything’ and that ‘it wasn’t [his] fault.’ He initially refused to let Marshall take Oaklee from him and stripped her of her clothes. Marshall could see Oaklee’s stomach and chest cavity extend as if she was trying to breathe air. However, she observed what appeared to be a mix of blood and spittle dripping from her mouth when she tried to exhale, which created a gurgling sound. Oaklee’s eyes remained closed throughout this time.”
The girl, by then, was likely dead or dying — but Waters allegedly would not allow the child’s mother to dial 911, Marshall told law enforcement. Instead, Waters wrapped Oaklee in a blanket and put her in the back of his car with Marshall, according to the affidavit. Marshall went on to tell police she opened the blanket to check on her daughter and found Oaklee had stopped trying to breathe — her lips had turned blue.
“Marshall felt her skin, which now seemed cool to the touch,” the affidavit goes on. “She could also no longer feel a heartbeat as she held her. Marshall pulled Oaklee’s eyelids back to further examine her but saw no movement or response in them. She held Oaklee’s hand before eventually climbing up to the front seat next to R. Waters.”
Said to be “hysterical and sobbing,” when leading investigators to the grim find, Marshall said she and Waters drove to the abandoned house together. There, he allegedly took Oaklee’s body out of the car, entered through a window, and came out soon thereafter, alone.
Oaklee’s decomposed body was found in the dresser’s bottom drawer. Police said her left leg had been “clearly broken at the knee so that the left foot rested directly over her chest.” In June 2023, the Morgan County Coroner’s Office determined she died due to a “homicide of unspecified means.”
Now, Waters will spend 45 years behind bars.
Under the terms of the plea agreement, the defendant will be sentenced to the maximum punishment for each of the three counts, and they will be assessed consecutively. The court has discretion to issue additional sentencing terms, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office told Law&Crime.
Marshall accepted a plea deal in late April and formalized her plea earlier this week. Her sentencing will occur on June 13, as well.
