A funeral will be held for 12-year-old Brooke Marie Bennett on Wednesday at the Randolph Union High School in Randolph, Vt.
The viewing will be Tuesday evening at the same location.
Brooke would have turned 13 on July 12.
Her body was found last Wednesday in a shallow grave in Randolph, a week after she was last seen on a convenience store video walking out of the store.
Brooke's uncle Michael Jacques has been charged with kidnapping. Police have not released a cause of death.
An obituary for Brooke in Saturday's Barre-Montpelier Times Argus says she loved her cat Lily and her dog Scruffy and liked to eat bagels, popcorn and spaghetti. At first, Brooke's disappearance appeared to be a story of an abduction by an Internet predator who befriended the Braintree girl through her MySpace page. But now prosecutors charge her abduction was planned by an uncle with a history of sex crimes who used Brooke's MySpace page and a series of e-mails he sent using aliases to plan her abduction while deflecting attention from himself. A 14-year-old girl, known in court papers as Juvenile 1, last saw Brooke alive when she was going upstairs with Jacques, 42, in his Randolph home on June 25, after Brooke was dropped off at a convenience store. Juvenile 1 told police it was her understanding that Brooke was to be initiated into a "program for sex" that Juvenile 1 had been involved with since she was 9 years old. A week later, Brooke's body was found buried about a mile from Jacques' house. Police and prosecutors haven't released the cause of Brooke's death, they haven't said she was murdered nor have they offered a motive for the kidnapping. But the federal kidnapping charge against Jacques carries with it a possible death sentence. The investigation continues, but officials said Thursday they knew of no other victims of what was once feared to be a sex ring. "This is the type of investigation where we are following every single lead," Vermont U.S. Attorney Thomas Anderson said at a news conference in Burlington. "Wherever it takes us, wherever the facts take us, is where we will go." Neither the Vermont State Police nor FBI released any information on the case Friday, the Independence Day holiday. Another defendant in the case, Raymond Gagnon, 40, of San Antonio, Brooke's former stepfather, was charged on Wednesday with obstructing justice in the case. The FBI says he had his roommate in Texas throw out a computer believed to contain child pornography as well as images of Juvenile 1 having sex with her underage boyfriend. A court affidavit by an FBI agent investigating the case said Jacques and Gagnon had several lengthy telephone conversations in the hours after Brooke was reported missing late on June 25 and early June 26. Brooke's disappearance sent a chill through Vermont when police issued the state's first Amber Alert. A video from the convenience store showed Brooke and Jacques together and then going in separate directions after leaving the store. At first, state police called it a MySpace case, believing that Brooke had met with someone she had befriended online and then lied to her family about her plans that day to meet a friend in Randolph and visit a hospitalized relative of that friend. Now prosecutors say it was Jacques who provided police the story about the meeting and that he and Juvenile 1 picked Brooke up in Randolph and took her to Jacques' home. Jacques also found one of Brooke's shoes near a small lake in Brookfield and planted pieces of her clothing nearby that were later found by police, investigators said. E-mails in the court documents released Thursday described how Juvenile 1 helped Jacques plant some of the false evidence, prosecutors said. Jacques coached Juvenile 1 on obtaining and preserving semen from her boyfriend to be placed on a pair of Brooke's underwear, to throw investigators off the trail. Jacques has a history of sex crimes dating to 1985 when he was charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl about 100 times. Prosecutors eventually dismissed that case. In 1993, Jacques was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and kidnapping. An affidavit in the case said Jacques tied up the victim and threatened to kill her while he sexually assaulted her. He was sentenced to six to 20-years in prison, but he was released early because of the Department of Corrections' "good time" policy in effect at the time. Brooke's father Jim Bennett and her stepmother Janet said they knew of Jacques' history as a sex offender, but he never saw any signs of trouble when Brooke and her uncle were together at family gatherings. "That's not something you tell a little girl," Janet Bennett told the Valley News of Lebanon, N.H. "She was just a beautiful little girl." Jim Bennett said parents needed to keep a close eye on their children, even around family because, "It's not just strangers you've got to watch out for."
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