EFFINGHAM CO., Ga. – The state of Georgia will seek the death penalty for four to five individuals charged in the deaths of two teenagers whose bodies were found buried behind their Guyton area house in December 2018.

Facing the death penalty for the deaths of brother and sister Mary Frances and Elwyn John Crocker, Jr., are Elwyn John Crocker, Sr., the father of the two teenagers, and Candice Heather Crocker, the stepmother. Also involved and charged will be Kimberly Renee Wright, the step-grandmother and Mark Anthony Wright, the brother of Candice Crocker.

All four will be arraigned in Effingham County Superior Court on Feb. 19 before Judge F. Gates Peed, according to a report from the Augusta Chronicle.

Malice murder, felony murder, aggravated sexual battery, cruelty to children, concealing the death of another and false imprisonment are the charges the four face.

The state hasn’t filed a death penalty notice in the case of a fifth person charged, Roy Anthony Prater, who was the step grandmother’s boyfriend.

Judge Peed saw the four in court with their public defenders last Tuesday.

All five pleaded not guilty last April 2019, but the four will be arraigned on a new indictment.

The bodies of the Crocker teens who were both 14 were found buried behind the family’s trailer in the Guyton, Georgia area, apparently starved, beaten, confined in a dog crate and tortured.

The murders were “outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible, or inhuman in that it involved torture or depravity of the mind,” the state said in death penalty notices.

Also in the indictments, the state said that the four defendants sodomized Mary Frances Crocker with a “foreign object.”

Gag orders have been issued by Judge Peed against the defendants, witnesses, law enforcement and attorneys.