On September 15, 2006, a woman in East St. Louis, Illinois, called the police and said she had been sexually assaulted in St. Louis and had given birth to a stillborn child after the attack. When officers arrived she had the dead infant with her and said it was hers. She refused to be examined at a hospital. The woman was Tiffany Hall, twenty-four. The baby was not hers. Hours earlier she had killed her closest friend, Jimella Tunstall, and cut the child out of her.
The two women had met as five-year-olds in kindergarten and stayed close into their twenties; people who knew them said they were like sisters. Tunstall was twenty-three and seven months pregnant, with three children already. Hall had been telling people she was pregnant too. She was not. She was hoping, prosecutors said, to lure her boyfriend home from the Navy. About a week before, she had bought supplies at a drugstore, and she later told investigators she had wanted her friend's baby for some time.
Hall struck Tunstall on the head repeatedly with a table leg and bound her with duct tape, put her in a bathtub, and cut her abdomen open with a pair of scissors to take the fetus. Tunstall bled to death in the tub. Hall wrapped the body, by one account in a shower curtain, and dragged it to a weeded lot. The State's Attorney's account in court placed the attack at Hall's mother's house; other reports of the same hearing place it in Tunstall's apartment in the John DeShields housing complex.
Three days later Hall went to the father of two of Tunstall's children and of the unborn child, who treated all three children as his own and was caring for them. She told him Tunstall had asked her to collect the children and Tunstall's car. He let them go with her. He told police it was the last time he saw them. Hall took DeMond, seven, Ivan, two, and Jinella, one, to the apartment where they had lived with their mother, and called out to them that it was time to take a bath. She drowned them one at a time in the tub, then hid the bodies in the washing machine and the dryer. Some reports give Jinella's age as ten months.
It came apart on September 21, when Hall told her boyfriend that she had killed a pregnant woman and taken the baby, and he went to the police. She was arrested that day. Two days later she led investigators to the apartment, where the children were found. A deputy coroner said she had told investigators she drowned them, and the autopsies appeared to bear that out. She was held on $5 million bond, and her public defender, Randy Kelley, asked for psychological testing to determine whether she had been sane.
On June 9, 2008, in the St. Clair County courthouse in Belleville, she pleaded guilty to all five charges, four counts of first-degree murder and one of intentional homicide of an unborn child, and was sentenced to life without parole. State's Attorney Robert Haida said prosecutors had agreed to drop the death penalty after her lawyers approached them about a plea and after the victims' relatives said they wanted the case to end. One of her attorneys, James Gomric, said she was fit to stand trial but had unresolved mental health problems and an IQ in the mid-seventies. In a yellow jumpsuit, she answered Judge Milton Wharton's questions quietly and declined to make a statement. "I will never get out," she said. She did not apologize to the family.
Some of Tunstall's relatives said they had already forgiven her. Tunstall's mother, Sandra Myers, said that taking one more life would not have been justice for the lives lost. "I have to forgive her," she said. "I believe in putting justice in God's hands."