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A woman hailing from Massachusetts who lived in a squalid home where police said that they found the now deceased skeletal remains of three babies pleaded not guilty on Monday to two counts of murder.
Erika Murray, 31, spoke quite clearly as she was arraigned Monday on nine charges. Superior Court Judge James Lemire ordered her to be held without bail. Mother of seven children, off which four are alive, while three deceased, was originally charged with fetal death concealment. She had pleaded to be not guilty to that lower charge but has been jailed ever since on $1 million bail.
Earlier during December a grand jury indicted Erika on nine counts, which also included two counts of assault on a child causing substantial body harm and injury, two counts of reckless endangerment of a child, two counts of cruelty to animals and one count of concealing a fetal death.
Her lawyer, Keith Halpern, has stated that there’s no substantiating evidence that she was the one who caused the deaths of these three babies.
Prosecutors said otherwise, the mother gave birth to five of her youngest children in the house’s bathroom, trying to conceal their existence from their father because he didn’t wanted to have more children. She appears to have kept them almost all of their time in the upstairs bedrooms along with trash.
She was also deemed mentally ill up to the point where she couldn’t do anything, and that was reflected in the house’s condition as well.
“If she wanted to murder these children, why did they find three corpses and not five? It does not make sense to portray her as a serial child killer,” said her lawyer.
The two murder charges pertain to two dead babies, who were found wearing diapers and one-piece infant outfits. The other set of remains were of a fetus, and all three of them were found in the bedroom’s closets.
