A Rhode Island man allowed a grieving mother to stay on his property. Months later, he learned she was charged in her daughter’s death.

In March George Whitford, who owns acres of farm fields and woods in Exeter, answered a woman’s plea on Facebook: she was living in a van and looking for a “peaceful” place to park it temporarily while she mourned her child’s death and sold her house.

Whitford was going through his own difficult time. His father was dying of cancer, and after meeting and hearing the woman’s story he offered her a place of respite off the road.

Sometimes he would see her there behind his house off Ten Rod Road -- the bespectacled, middle-aged woman who gave her name as Shelli Guisingle, sitting outside her white, handicap-accessible van, reading beside a generator.

“I thought what she was doing was a little odd,” he says. “But my father’s condition preoccupied my mind and I really didn’t invade her space.”

It would be five months, Whitford says, before he learned the woman had “lied” to him about her identity and the circumstances of her child’s death.

Her real name, he says, was Michele Rothgeb. Her adopted daughter did not die of a seizure while playing with toys in her room, as she explained it to him.

Zha-Nae Rothgeb was 9 and had cerebral palsy, a disorder marked by impaired muscular coordination. She died in January 2019 after spending as long as eight hours in a bathtub, police say, in Rothgeb’s Warwick home.

Rothgeb, 57, faces a charge of manslaughter in the girl’s death.

State prosecutors have also charged her with multiple felonies of cruelty to or neglect of seven other children with special needs whom she had adopted -- all with approval of state child welfare officials.

When police and a rescue crew responded to her home on Oakland Beach Avenue on Jan. 3, 2019, they reported it reeked of urine and feces. They found the house strewn with garbage, bugs on the ceiling and a pile of soiled diapers on the floor of Zha-Nae’s bedroom. One bed in that room “had been soiled with feces and urine and appeared not to have been changed in many months.”

Last month a friend of Whitford’s showed up. And what they told Whitford when they returned alarmed him.

“They said it was clear to them she was making up her story as she went along.” One of them thought they recognized her, too.

An online search revealed her true identity, Whitford says. He saw a photograph taken by The Providence Journal. The woman, Michele Rothgeb, standing in court facing a judge, was the woman on his property.

“I was disgusted when I read her story, and shocked at her lies,” he says. “She was trying to manipulate me the way she had the [child welfare] system.”