Megan Huntsman, the Utah woman who pleaded guilty to killing six of her newborn babies in her garage, has been sentenced to life imprisonment. According to ABC News , judge Darold McDade handed over the sentence to Megan in a case that had drawn worldwide attention. In a court appearance earlier, Megan admitted to orchestrating the deaths of six of her babies born between 1996 and 2006.
Megan was handed the maximum sentence and will likely spend the next 30 years in jail, which effectively means that she will likely spend the rest of her life in prison. The sentencing comes two months after Megan pleaded guilty to six counts of murder. Megan’s release date will soon be decided by a parole committee, Yahoo! News reported.
Megan, 40, was a resident of Pleasant Grove, a small community located 45 miles south of Salt Lake City. Her horrific admission was met with shock and disbelief by members of the 35,000-strong community. It was last year that the community came to know about the fate of Megan’s six ill-fated children, whose bodies she had kept hidden in her garage. For a decade, Megan was able to hide her sinister crime from the people living in the vicinity. It was her estranged husband, Darren West, who first found the bodies of several children in her garage back in April of 2014. Megan’s husband, who is also a convict, was in prison for eight years. However, he was living with Megan during the time she committed the murders. The police, however, believe he wasn’t involved in the crimes.
The body of a seventh child was also found, but it was later deduced to be that of a stillborn baby.
Following her arrest, Megan had admitted to police officers that she was addicted to methamphetamine and that she was simply too addicted to the drug to be able to care for her children. She then pleaded guilty to six counts of murder and took responsibility for the deaths of her own babies.
Following investigations, it was revealed that Huntsman gave birth to the babies between 1996 and 2006 and had them strangled or suffocated right after they were born. The bodies of the babies were wrapped in cloth as well as plastic and were kept in boxes inside her garage. She went about her life normally even as the bodies lay in the garage for almost a decade.
It remains unclear how Huntsman was able to achieve the feat of hiding her pregnancy, births, and the subsequent killings from her husband and family members.
Do you think Megan Huntsman received an apt sentence for the crime she committed?
[Image via the Huffington Post ]
