News of the Week
by Diane Fiore
Autopsies completed on 7 Utah babies
found in garage; police, prosecutors to
review results
Fox News
Megan Huntsman’s booking photo in a Utah County jail after
being arraigned for smothering or suffocated six of her newborn
babies soon after giving birth
• Huntsman, 39, acknowledged to police that she killed six of
the babies, put them in plastic bags and then packed them
inside boxes in the garage of her home south of Salt Lake City
over a decade from 1996 to 2006. She told police one of the
babies was stillborn
• Neighbors have described Huntsman as a nice, quiet woman
who was trusted to take care of children and generally seen
as a good person.
• Huntsman was arraigned Monday, April 16th on six charges
of murder and ordered held on $6 million bond.
• She did voluntarily turn herself into police
• When asked by Judge Steven Hansen what she thought of the
size of the bail, Huntsman, speaking via closed circuit TV from
the Utah County jail, stared blankly and responded, "That's
fine."
• Huntsman's estranged husband, Darren West, discovered
one of the babies' bodies in a cardboard box in the garage
of their Pleasant Grove home last weekend while he was
cleaning up
• West, lived with Huntsman during the decade she said the
births and deaths occurred, but he was in federal prison on
drug charges from 2006 until January 2014
• The couple's three daughters were living in the house the
entire time, they are now ages 20, 18 and 14
• DNA tests will reportedly be
conducted by the FBI to
determine the father and mother
of each infant
• Police do not consider 41-year-old West, a suspect or a person of
interest at this time, even though he is believed to have fathered all of
the infants.
The home where the
babies bodies were
discovered
•
Questions continue to swirl around Megan Huntsman’s dark and disturbing
case, including how people — including her husband — apparently were
unaware she was giving birth to children almost every year for a decade
•
No one knew the woman was pregnant with her two eldest daughters until she
gave birth to them at a hospital. Huntsman also has a 14-year-old daughter
who somehow escaped the serial filicide by their mother
•
One of Huntsman’s longtime Pleasant Grove neighbors has said she had
noticed Huntsman go through some weight fluctuations through the years, but
never thought she was pregnant.
•
Even Huntsman’s West Valley City boyfriend, James Brady, told ABC4 that he
did not know she was pregnant last year until she miscarried.
April 21, 2014 court
appearance
By Jessica miller
The Salt Lake Tribune
Provo • Criminal charges
against a woman accused of
killing six of her babies likely
won’t be filed until her court
appearance next week.
UTAH DOES CARRY THE DEATH PENALTY
Utah Criminal Code
Title 76 Chapter 5 Section 202
Offenses Against the Person
76-5-202. Aggravated murder.
(1) Criminal homicide constitutes aggravated murder if the actor intentionally or knowingly
causes the death of another under any of the following circumstances:
76-5-203. Murder
2) Criminal homicide constitutes murder if:
(a) the actor intentionally or knowingly causes the death of another;
Monstrous women who kill
• The first year of life of a child is the riskiest for a mother when it comes to
committing filicide(murder by parent)
• Cheryl Meyer, a psychologist at Wright State University in Ohio and coauthor of several books on the subject, said it's probable that a mother kills
a child somewhere in the U.S. once every three days.
• Mothers who kill their children tend to fall into five categories, according to
Meyer's research on dozens of cases: killing of a newborn, killing through
abuse, being assisted or coerced by a partner, killing purposely and killing
through neglect. The last category includes women who leave children in a
bathtub or a hot car and come back to find them dead
On the evening of October 26, 1997, Susan Dianne
Eubanks committed the unthinkable when she shot
and killed her four children execution style at her
home in California to seek revenge against her exhusband.
• In March of 2013, a German court convicted a woman of manslaughter and sentenced her to ONLY nine years in prison for
killing five of her newborn babies
• In Texas, Frances Newton was executed at the age of 40 by lethal injection for the April 7, 1987 murder of her husband,
Adrian, her 7-year-old son, Alton, and her 21-month-old daughter, Farrah.
• It has been 12 years since Andrea Yates was first convicted of drowning each of her five children in the bathtub in a
Houston suburb
Diane Downs shot her three children, with the
intention to kill them all. She confessed later
that her children got in the way of her love,
since her boyfriend didn't want to share her
with them.
CITATIONS
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/04/18/autopsies-completed-on-7-utah-babies-found-in-garage-police-prosecutors-to/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/15/megan-huntsman-babies_n_5156010.html
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/home3/57826827-200/huntsman-infants-police-west.html.csp (Salt Lake City Tribune)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/13/woman-arrested-7-dead-babies/7681445/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cops-utah-woman-hid-pregancies-of-living-children-too/
http://le.utah.gov/~code/TITLE76/htm/76_05_020200.htm (Utah criminal code)
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57844650-78/huntsman-police-judge-court.html.csp (4-21-2014 first hearing)
http://www.oddee.com/item_98679.aspx (Monstrous mothers article)