Frozen Baby Mom Sentenced to 50 Years After Discarding Newborn to Freeze on Roadside (VIDEO)
The so-called "Frozen Baby Mom" has been sentenced to 50 years in prison. The northern Illinois woman admitted in the case to leaving her newborn baby daughter to freeze to death on a rural roadway in 2004, and was sentenced on Friday.
Katie Stockton, 32, could have been sentenced up to 60 years in prison, but her current sentence will see her potentially remain behind bars until she is 82 years old.
In the case the baby became known as Baby Crystal around the Rock River Valley after her frozen remains were found.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Earlier in the court case prosecutors dropped 11 other murder charges in exchange for Stockton's guilty plea. She pleaded guilty to a single charge of first degree murder. However, despite the plea deal Winnebago County Judge John Truitt did permit testimony about skeletal remains of two other infants found years later in the trunk of Stockton's car, according to the Rockford Register Star reported.
It is believed that Stockton kept her pregnancy a secret and eventually gave birth to the baby without anyone knowing on Dec. 17, 2004. However, she then put the baby and soiled clothing into a shopping bag and left it on the side of a road near her parent's residence.
After the baby was found an investigation to find the infant's mother got underway and after being questioned by police she denied that the baby was hers and refused to provide a DNA sample.
Years later detectives found evidence on a cigarette butt from Stockton and matched the DNA to the blood found on Baby Crystal's clothing. The mother was arrested in 2009 after tests proved that she was the baby's mother to 99.96 percent accuracy.
After that investigators found her car in an impound lot, where it had apparently remained for years. They found the skeletal remains of two other infants wrapped in cloth and stuffed in separate plastic bags and buried beneath a spare tire, chain saw and tire iron.
