Darren West called 911 from the garage of the house in Pleasant Grove, Utah, on April 12, 2014. He had been cleaning it out and had found, he told the dispatcher, what he believed was a dead baby in a bag. West had recently come home after eight years in prison on methamphetamine charges, and the house was the one he had shared with his estranged wife, Megan Huntsman, and their three daughters.
When Detective Dan Beckstrom of the Pleasant Grove police sat down with Huntsman that day, only the one body had been found, and she told him the baby had been stillborn. About an hour into the interview word came through that officers had found more. In the end there were seven, wrapped in bags, sealed with electrical tape and packed into boxes with clothes and towels. At least one had a black elastic hair tie around its neck, which Huntsman admitted she had put there to make certain the child was dead.
She told Beckstrom that she had given birth to all seven alone, in the bathroom or the bedroom, between January 1996 and the end of 2006, and that nobody had known she was pregnant. Five were girls and two were boys; West was the father of all of them. Six she had killed within minutes of birth, pressing her thumbs against the baby's throat or smothering it, and then held each one for a few minutes to be sure there was no heartbeat. The seventh, she maintained, had been born dead, and that child is not among the counts. She kept them in the garage, she said, because she was afraid that if she moved them or got rid of them she would be caught.
The detective asked her the obvious question: why had three daughters lived? The two oldest, she said, were born before she had a drug problem. When she was carrying the youngest, two women in her family were pregnant at the same time, and she had told them she was expecting too. "[The child] was not murdered," Beckstrom later testified, "because the pregnancy was known."
She was charged with six counts of murder, each a first-degree felony, and held on six million dollars bail. In February 2015 she pleaded guilty as charged. The plea deal had the prosecution recommending that the terms, five years to life on each count, run concurrently. Her lawyer, Anthony Howell, told the court that she had become pregnant as a teenager, had two children young and soon afterward became addicted to drugs, and he pointed out that the state would have had no case without her confession.
At the sentencing hearing in Provo on April 20, 2015, the prosecution took the unusual step of calling Beckstrom to the stand to lay out what the investigation had found. Huntsman, then forty, did not speak, but Howell read her statement. She put what she had done down to methamphetamine and alcohol addiction, an abusive marriage and depression. "In some small way, I wanted to help them avoid the terrible life I would have given them," it read. "I deprived my little babies of the opportunity of life."
Her sister Jamie told the judge that Megan was not a monster, only frightened. Letters from two of her three daughters were read aloud; the youngest wrote that the mother she knew made dinner every night and kept a clean house, and that nobody could have guessed. No one spoke for the infants. West sat in the courtroom and said nothing. Utah County Attorney Jeff Buhman called the killings "very cold and calculated."
Judge Darold McDade of the Fourth District Court rejected the concurrent recommendation as not appropriate and ordered three of the six terms to run consecutively, the other three alongside them. "I really thought I'd seen it all until this case came along," he said. Buhman had predicted she would serve at least thirty years before a first parole hearing. The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole later set that hearing for April 2064, when she will be eighty-nine.