Banita Jacks, the woman charged with murdering her four daughters after a series of tragic errors by city welfare bureaucrats, was ordered held Monday without bail.

Jacks, 33, whom authorities said killed her children because she thought they were possessed by demons, was silent in D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick H. Weisberg’s courtroom. She rested her face on her hand as she listened to D.C. police Det. Mitchell Credle describe how she killed her children and then lay T-shirts over their bodies.

“There was a lot of blood,” Credle testified. But authorities still don’t know what killed the three youngest girls — Tatianna, 11, N’Kiah, 6, and Aja, 5 — because toxicology tests haven’t come back yet.

Credle told the packed courtroom that Jacks had fought with Brittany, 17, in the weeks before she died. Jacks described her eldest daughter as “fast,” a “bad influence” on her sisters and “poisoned by the things of the world.”

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The girls’ badly decomposed bodies were discovered last month, after U.S. marshals came to evict them from a ramshackle row house in Southeast. But the case had implications beyond the girls’ deaths: Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration was embarrassed to discover that dozens of city welfare bureaucrats had contact with the Jacks family but no one intervened to save the children.

Fenty angrily fired six officials and has moved to fire three others for the collapse of services around the Jacks family.

The last time anyone saw the children alive, Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Sines told the court, they were helping their mother move furniture into the back yard on Mothers’ Day, 2007.

The last time anyone spoke to the girls was in early April, when someone sent a message to Brittany’s My Space page, Sines said.

Around the same time that the last e-mail messages went out from Brittany, a panicked social worker from Brittany’s school called city officials, begging them to check on the family because she suspected that the children were being “held hostage” and were in danger. City workers closed the cases because no one answered the door.

Missed chances

» July 12, 2006: Child welfare and health officials are warned that the family is living in a van. Case closed because there’s no fixed address.

» March 21, 2007: Meridian charter school officials cross the three missing youngest girls off the rolls without checking to see if they’re OK.

» April 27, 2007: A school social worker begs child welfare officials to check on the oldest girl and the family.

» May 16, 2007: Family’s case is closed; child welfare officials claim the family has moved to Maryland, but haven’t checked.

bmyers@dcexaminer.com