Frozen Baby Mom Sentenced To 50 Years In Prison

Katie Stockton, 32, the mom who left her newborn baby named Crystal on a desolate country road to freeze to death, has been sentenced to 50 years in prison on Friday.

Rockford Register Star reports:

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.

This is how she murdered her baby girl.

Stockton ignored her baby girl’s cries, stuffed her in a plastic Halloween-themed Menard’s bag with the placenta and a bunch of bloody clothes, packaged it in a white garbage bag with red draw string and left the infant outside her family’s Rockton home in sub-freezing temperatures.

Baby Crystal couldn’t breathe with all the clothes and the plastic. She either suffocated or froze to death.

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.