Woman who stored remains of six infants in storage locker shows no remorse: Crown
The Crown says a woman convicted of concealing the bodies of six infants in a rented Winnipeg storage locker has shown no remorse for her actions and should be sentenced to 11 years in jail.
Crown attorney Debbie Buors told Andrea Giesbrecht’s sentencing hearing the 43-yearold carefully hid all six pregnancies, placed the remains in bags and plastic containers and carried them to a U-haul storage locker.
“There was no dignity given to those individuals, those fetuses,” Buors told court Friday.
“There has been no remorse shown by Andrea Giesbrecht.”
Giesbrecht was arrested in October 2014 after she defaulted on paying rent for the storage locker. Staff, who were to auction off the locker’s contents, opened a plastic bin, noticed a strange smell and called police.
Medical experts testified the infants were Giesbrecht’s, were at or near full-term, and were likely to have been born alive.
But because the remains were badly decomposed, it was impossible to determine how the infants died.
Giesbrecht’s motive remains a mystery. She did not testify at her trial, where she was convicted earlier this year of six counts of concealing the dead body of a child, and the defence did not call any witnesses.
Her lawyer, Greg Brodsky, disputed the idea that the infants were born alive and said Giesbrecht was storing the remains in order to save them.
But the judge rejected that assertion, noting that Giesbrecht went to great lengths to hide her pregnancies from her family and others, and knew about being pregnant and delivering babies. She had her two children in hospital. She also had 10 legal abortions.
Buors said there is nothing in Giesbrecht’s past to explain her actions.
“She had a very normal upbringing. There was no history of abuse.”
Giesbrecht also has no addiction issues other than a gambling problem related to an earlier fraud conviction, Buors added. She violated a probation order from that conviction by going to a casino in 2014.