81/2 years for woman who concealed dead babies
Woman ‘unprecedented as an offender’
The horror lies in little things, the ones both known and not: a pair of underwear, size four, Scooby Doo. A concrete disc, the body gone — liquefied — an impression left behind. A descriptive phrase, tossed off in a long ruling, of containers: “sticky, squishy and liquid brown.”
On Friday afternoon, a Manitoba judge sentenced Andrea Giesbrecht, a gambling addict and mother of two, to eight and a half years in prison for concealing the remains of six infants in a Winnipeg storage locker.
Three employees of the locker company found the bodies when Giesbrecht stopped paying her rent. Some were stuffed in rubber bins. One was mummified, one wrapped in a towel and sealed in a five-gallon pail.
In his ruling, broadcast live online, Provincial Court Judge Murray Thompson called Giesbrecht “unprecedented as an offender.” He decried her “extreme moral culpability,” and cited evidence from the trial that “some, if not all, of the infants would have been born alive.”
“Her conduct must be denounced,” Thompson said, before sentencing her to serve four consecutive twoyear terms, plus two more, of six and 12 months each. He subtracted eight months from that total for time served, plus another year to prevent the sentence, he said, from being “unduly long or harsh.”
The case, which carried on for more than 30 months after Giesbrecht’s arrest, nonetheless left many questions unanswered. Indeed, the central mysteries remain. There’s no conclusion, no catharsis — not yet — just a jumble of terrible details and facts.
Giesbrecht, according to Thompson’s ruling, concealed six pregnancies over an unknown period of years. She carried each to full term or close to it, without her husband or best friend discovering the truth.
DNA evidence linked all six infants to Giesbrecht and
THE LAW DOES NOT CONTEMPLATE AN OFFENDER LIKE THIS.
her husband. She also had 11 therapeutic abortions and gave birth to two children — one in 1997 and one in 2002 — that she raised along with her husband.
After giving birth to each of the six infants, Giesbretch took steps to dispose of them. She stuffed several in white kitchen garbage bags, wrapped them in towels and tote bags and jammed them in blue plastic bins, along with toys and baby clothes — “an infant-sized long-sleeved shirt,” a pair of “size four Scooby Doo underwear.” She eventually stored them all in a storage locker she rented using her maiden name.
One body was found encased in concrete. The remains had largely liquefied, but “an impression of the body remained in the hardened disc.” The sixth was sealed in some kind of white powder, “leaving it hard and mummified.” The placenta was found in a plastic bag underneath.
Medical examiners could not conclusively prove that any of the six infants had lived after Giesbrecht gave birth to them, that they had taken a breath or eaten, which is why she wasn’t charged with murder. However, during the trial, several experts testified that all of them “were likely to have been born alive.”
Thompson cited significant aggravating factors to justify the sentence, which wasn’t far from the maximum allowable under the law. The Crown was seeking 11 years minus the 168 days she has already spent in jail, the defence argued for time served. Giesbrecht “does not come before the court as a person of good moral character,” he said.
She had two fraud convictions on her record and a third for breaching probation. She drained her own finances and the finances of her parents to feed a gambling addiction, Thompson said.
Giesbrecht, 43, had no issues with drugs or alcohol and no history of mental illness. She wasn’t, Thompson said, a young, unwed mother confused or terrified by a first birth. “The law does not contemplate an offender like this,” he said.
Before delivering his verdict, Thompson tossed out an attempt by Giesbrecht’s attorneys to have the case dismissed due to unreasonable delay. The motion, heard Friday morning, was filed far too late, Thompson said.
Giesbrecht, he said in his ruling, had not committed a victimless crime. Anyone forced to grapple with the evidence in this case — the workers who found the bodies, the police officers who processed them, court officials, pathologists and others who produced and scrutinized the evidence — had suffered.