An Illinois woman who admitted to leaving her newborn daughter outside to freeze to death along rural roadway back in 2004 has been sentenced to 50 years in jail according to the Associaed Press.
Katie Stockton, 32, faced a total of 60 years in prison for letting her child, who became known as Baby Crystal around the Rock River Valley, die after her frozen remains were found by police.
Prosecutors dropped 11 remaining murder charged in exchange for a guilty plea last February, charging Stockton with a single-count of first-degree murder.
Winnebago County Judge John Truitt allowed testimony about skeletal remains of two other infants found years later in the trunk of Stockton's car before handing down the sentence according to the Rockford Register Star.
Stockton was questioned for the baby's death back in 2004, but she denied profusely that she was related to the child and refused on a number of occasions to provide a DNA sample according to the Associated Press.
Stockton hid her pregnancy and gave birth to the baby in secret on Dec. 17, 2004. After the child was born, she put the baby and soiled clothing into an orange shopping bag and placed it on a "dead-end road" near her parents' Rockton home according to a police report.
It took detectives years to collect DNA evidence, but they had a breakthrough when a cigarette butt was discovered discarded by Stockton. The saliva on the butt matched blood they found on clothing with Baby Crystal.
Stockton was formally arrested in 2009 after further tests showed she was in fact the mother of the baby with a DNA showing she was a 99.9 percent match according to the Associated Press.
Investigators discovered her car had been in an impound lot for over a year and searched it for more evidence. That's when they discovered the skeletal remains of two other infants wrapped in cloth and stuffed in separate plastic bags and buried beneath a spare tire, chain saw and tire iron.
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