ROCKFORD — Baby Crystal suffocated and froze to death 99 feet from the
front door of the rural Rockton home of Katie L. Stockton’s family. It
was a week before Christmas 2004 and the infant was just 99 feet from
warmth and safety.
Stockton gave birth to the healthy baby girl in secret Dec. 17, 2004. Stockton had managed to pretend she wasn’t pregnant. She hid it from her friends, co-workers and family who had their suspicions.
Maybe she managed to convince even herself she wasn’t pregnant.
On Friday, she learned she will have decades to consider her decisions after being sentenced to 50 years in prison for the murder of her infant daughter who she left to die on the side of a road by her parents’ home.
“I was in a very dark place for many years,” Stockton told Judge John Truitt. “I apologize to those I hurt and ask forgiveness. I’m truly sorry for the pain and hurt they have endured.”
Public Defender David Doll told Truitt that Stockton is a good person who has strong work and family ethics but who had struggled with drug addiction. Doll said she has one incredible failing: an inability to face the fact of her pregnancy.
Doll asked for a lenient, yet punishing 25-year sentence for first-degree murder that would mean Stockton would remain in prison until her child-bearing years were finished.
But Truitt said what Stockton had done — even as he tried not to consider the “deranged” placement of two additional infant skeletons in the trunk of her navy blue Saturn — was too heinous a crime for a lenient sentence.
Stockton chose to leave her baby to die despite all the available options Truitt ticked off: adoption, legal abandonment at a designated safe haven or her own loving family who already cared for her then 4-year-old son.
“You did the incomprehensible,” Truitt told Stockton. “You gave birth, by all accounts, to a healthy, full-term baby girl and you chose to play judge, jury and executioner and put her by the roadside like yesterday’s garbage.”
Stockton wore a black sweater and her hair pulled into a pony tail. She wept through much of the marathon sentencing hearing that lasted most of Friday and included 15 witnesses for the prosecution and just one for Stockton, her mother, Lisa Landsee.
Baby Crystal wasn’t the first time Stockton hid a pregnancy. She had tried at least once before in 2000 when her son was born. But that time, Landsee arrived just in the nick of time. Landsee said her daughter grew up an intelligent, good-natured, generous girl with many typical interests.
SOURCE : http://www.rrstar.com/updates/x1959368594/Katie-Stockton-sentenced-to-50-years-for-killing-daughter
Stockton gave birth to the healthy baby girl in secret Dec. 17, 2004. Stockton had managed to pretend she wasn’t pregnant. She hid it from her friends, co-workers and family who had their suspicions.
Maybe she managed to convince even herself she wasn’t pregnant.
On Friday, she learned she will have decades to consider her decisions after being sentenced to 50 years in prison for the murder of her infant daughter who she left to die on the side of a road by her parents’ home.
“I was in a very dark place for many years,” Stockton told Judge John Truitt. “I apologize to those I hurt and ask forgiveness. I’m truly sorry for the pain and hurt they have endured.”
Public Defender David Doll told Truitt that Stockton is a good person who has strong work and family ethics but who had struggled with drug addiction. Doll said she has one incredible failing: an inability to face the fact of her pregnancy.
Doll asked for a lenient, yet punishing 25-year sentence for first-degree murder that would mean Stockton would remain in prison until her child-bearing years were finished.
But Truitt said what Stockton had done — even as he tried not to consider the “deranged” placement of two additional infant skeletons in the trunk of her navy blue Saturn — was too heinous a crime for a lenient sentence.
Stockton chose to leave her baby to die despite all the available options Truitt ticked off: adoption, legal abandonment at a designated safe haven or her own loving family who already cared for her then 4-year-old son.
“You did the incomprehensible,” Truitt told Stockton. “You gave birth, by all accounts, to a healthy, full-term baby girl and you chose to play judge, jury and executioner and put her by the roadside like yesterday’s garbage.”
Stockton wore a black sweater and her hair pulled into a pony tail. She wept through much of the marathon sentencing hearing that lasted most of Friday and included 15 witnesses for the prosecution and just one for Stockton, her mother, Lisa Landsee.
Baby Crystal wasn’t the first time Stockton hid a pregnancy. She had tried at least once before in 2000 when her son was born. But that time, Landsee arrived just in the nick of time. Landsee said her daughter grew up an intelligent, good-natured, generous girl with many typical interests.
SOURCE : http://www.rrstar.com/updates/x1959368594/Katie-Stockton-sentenced-to-50-years-for-killing-daughter
