Hidden Pregnancies, Secret Infant Murders and a Baby Mausoleum in the Garage: Inside a Mom's Grisly Spree

Content warning: The following article contains disturbing details.

The newborn lived only minutes before Megan Huntsman choked the child’s life out. When she got pregnant again, she killed that baby, too. Over the course of a decade, starting in 1996, she killed six of her newborns.

Huntsman kept the victims’ bodies – wrapped in plastic – in a makeshift mausoleum in her garage, according to the Utah County Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutors say she killed each baby within minutes of giving birth to them and that “immediately after” she would choke or smother the baby, “sometimes by wrapping a ligature around the infant’s neck but most often by pressing on their throats with her thumbs until they stopped breathing.” After, she “stashed the bodies in various boxes and containers” in her Pleasant Grove, Utah, home.

According to prosecutors, Huntsman later told investigators that she had killed her six babies because she was “too messed up on meth” to take care of them.

A seventh baby was also found in the garage: this one a stillborn, The New York Times reported in 2014, the year of her arrest.

In yet another strange turn of events, relatives and neighbors said they never guessed the woman was pregnant, claiming Huntsman – a slight woman weighing just 105 lbs. – managed to successfully hide the seven pregnancies, per The Times. Friends said they just assumed she’d gained a little weight.

But the woman did not hide every pregnancy. At the time of her arrest, Huntsman had three living daughters — two born before the killing spree began and one in the midst of it, per The Times.

Those close to Huntsman told The Times that she claimed she was the victim of domestic abuse, although local police said there were no complaints of domestic violence at the home.

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There were seemingly several missed opportunities by officials to catch the mother over the course of her decade of killing.

Federal drug enforcement officers had searched the Utah home in 2005 – a year before the last killing – while investigating her husband, Darren Brad West, The Times reported. (By 2014, the pair were estranged.) The officers found evidence of drugs in the garage but missed the deceased babies also hidden there.

A year later, West pleaded guilty to two drug possession charges and was sentenced to nine years in prison, according to court documents later filed in the case and reviewed by PEOPLE.

Just two weeks after his indictment, someone anonymously reported to Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services that Huntsman was using methamphetamine, law enforcement officials told The Times, but the department then declined to elaborate on if or how social workers responded, citing confidentiality in the case.

Finally, in 2014, West’s relatives were searching in the garage when they came upon the seven tiny, plastic-wrapped, heavily decaying bodies, per The Times.

Following her arrest, Huntsman was held at Utah County Jail and placed on suicide watch, per The Times.

On February 12, 2015, Huntsman, then 40, pleaded guilty to six counts of first degree murder, according to prosecutors. Later that year she was sentenced to six life sentences – three of them consecutive – and sent to a Utah State Correctional Facility, where she was assigned Offender Number 221913. 

The mother’s first parole hearing is slated for April 2064, according to prosecutors. At that time, she would be 89 years old.

If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.