Utah Mom Who Killed 6 Babies Is Sentenced to 30 Years to Life

Megan Huntsman, the 40-year-old woman charged with six counts of murder after six infant corpses were found in her garage, has been sentenced to 30 years to life behind bars.

Huntsman says she was too addicted to drugs to care for the children, according to USA Today.

“In some small way, I wanted to help them avoid the terrible life I would have given them,” Megan Huntsman said in a statement her attorney read aloud. “I deprived my little babies of the opportunity of life. … Those babies aren’t coming back, and they never will because of my actions.”

In February, Huntsman pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder for killing the babies after giving birth at home between 1996 and 2006. She kept their remains in separate boxes in her garage, which her estranged husband Darren West found while doing spring cleaning. He’d just come home from serving a stint in prison for drugs himself, and DNA tests show that he fathered all of the infants.

Huntsman attributes her crimes to addiction, depression, and marital abuse. She has three older living daughters who all sent letters to the court:

“This is not the Mom I know,” her letter reads. “The Mom I know was the one who had dinner for us every night, a clean house and was a loving mother. Nobody could guess my mom would do anything like this.”

Separately, Jamie Huntsman told the court her sister “is not a monster. She’s not evil. From what I understand, she was scared.”

Last year, one woman who lived near Huntsman at the time of the murders told the Salt Lake Tribune that the drug-addled mom was a kind neighbor, and that she never noticed that Huntsman was ever pregnant.

The ex-husband’s parents own the home, and Huntsman’s three daughters still live there, said longtime neighbor Sharon Chipman. The eldest daughters are around 18 to 20 years old, while the youngest is now about 13, Chipman said. Chipman hasn’t seen the daughters since the news broke.

The ex had been cleaning out the garage on Saturday getting ready to move back into the house this summer, Chipman said. “He was finally coming down to help take care of his family — and to run across that, it would devastate him,” Chipman said. Chipman had noticed that Huntsman had gained and lost some weight in the years she lived there, but Chipman never considered that she was pregnant. She was a great neighbor, and Chipman even trusted Huntsman to watch her grandson, when he was a toddler, for years.