Megan Huntsman
- Victims
- 6 CONVICTIONS for first-degree felony murder, all by guilty plea. Four of the newborns were suffocated and two strangled, shortly after birth, between 1996 and 2006. A SEVENTH CHILD WAS STILLBORN and she concealed that death; it is not among the six counts. Her first three children were not harmed and were alive when the killings were discovered
- Years active
- 1996 - 2006
- Location
- Pleasant Grove, Utah County, Utah, USA
- Method
- Strangulation - Suffocation
- Status
- Her crimes came to light in April 2014 when her estranged husband Darren West, recently released from eight years in prison on methamphetamine charges, returned to their Pleasant Grove home to collect belongings and found an infant’s remains in the garage wrapped in plastic and sealed in a taped box. Police found six more stored the same way. She PLEADED GUILTY ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015 TO SIX COUNTS OF FIRST-DEGREE FELONY MURDER and was sentenced on April 20, 2015 to six consecutive terms. THE UTAH BOARD OF PARDONS AND PAROLE HAS SET HER INITIAL PAROLE HEARING FOR APRIL 2064, when she will be eighty-nine; counting time in custody before sentencing she will have served at least half a century before she can first ask to be released. Held at the Utah State Correctional Facility. SOURCES DIFFER ON THE SENTENCE: contemporaneous reporting gives five years to life on each count, while other accounts give fifteen years to life; the 2064 hearing date is confirmed by the Board itself and is the firmer fact.
Huntsman was born in 1975 and lived in Pleasant Grove, in Utah County. Between 1996 and 2006 she gave birth seven times, alone, concealing the pregnancies from those around her. Six of the babies she strangled or suffocated immediately after birth; the seventh was stillborn. She wrapped each one, put it in a box or a bag, and stored them in the garage of the house.
She was living with methamphetamine addiction through the whole period, which she gave as the reason afterwards, and she had three older daughters who were raised in the house and knew nothing about it.
On April 12, 2014 her estranged husband, clearing the garage of the property after moving back in, opened a box and found a body. Police recovered seven.
She was arrested and held on six million dollars bail, pleaded guilty on February 12, 2015 to six counts of murder, and on April 20, 2015 was sentenced to six terms of five years to life, to be served consecutively, which in Utah means release is effectively at the discretion of the parole board and unlikely.
The case belongs with Sabine Hilschenz in this archive: repeated concealed pregnancies over a decade in an ordinary suburban house, bodies kept on the property, and nobody in the household aware of any of it.