Mother was keeping, not concealing, babies’ remains in locker: defence

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/10/2016 (3322 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg mother kept human remains in a storage locker to save them, not conceal their existence, her defence lawyer told court Wednesday after the Crown rested its case against 42-year-old Andrea Giesbrecht.

Giesbrecht did store the human remains, but didn’t have any criminal intent, defence lawyer Greg Brodsky said.

“She could have got rid of them. She wanted to keep them,” he said.

Giesbrecht now awaits provincial court Judge Murray Thompson’s verdict after lawyers on both sides presented their final arguments Wednesday.

She pleaded not guilty to six counts of concealing a child’s body after the decayed remains of six infants – five boys and one girl – were discovered in a McPhillips Street storage locker in October 2014. The badly decomposed remains – some no more than bones — were found in garbage bags contained in plastic totes, along with other items such as toy cars and a Happy Meal coupon. Some of the remains had placenta and umbilical cords attached.

Medical experts testified the babies had likely been born alive, at or near full term. The remains were too decomposed to determine how the infants died.

Although she couldn’t prove it, Crown attorney Debbie Buors floated a theory that the six babies had been born at home, dumped into plastic “kitchen catcher” bags and hidden in the storage unit, with detergent and possibly cement poured over some of the remains “to mask the smell” of decay.

“If the Crown could prove that, we would be here on a different set of charges,” Buors told court.

The Crown’s case focused on establishing Giesbrecht had a history of “deception” about pregnancy, relying on her medical records and testimony from Giesbrecht’s oblivious friends and family, including her husband, who said he had no idea she was pregnant with the couple’s oldest son until the day he was born.

But Brodsky disputed the Crown’s suggestion Giesbrecht had delivered the six babies at home. He said “there were no live births,” and asked the judge not to consider speculation in his decision.

He repeatedly questioned why, if Giesbrecht were trying to conceal the remains, she would have kept them in a heated storage locker when there were non-heated, less expensive units available.

“These products of conception weren’t meant to be concealed; they weren’t meant to be disposed of,” he said.

“She wanted to keep them in a big, unnecessary heated locker… she didn’t dispose of them or throw them in the dump.”

It doesn’t matter that the remains were kept in plastic bags, Brodsky argued.

“I’m not going to say this is a weird case, but it is,” he said.

The defence’s argument focused heavily on the dates the offences were alleged to have occurred and the words used to describe storage of the remains. They were not “disposed of,” Brodsky argued, and said the Crown had no proof Giesbrecht disposed of them between March 2014, when Giesbrecht rented the U-Haul storage unit, and October 2014, when the remains were discovered. Those are the dates indicated on the criminal charges.

Brodsky also argued there is no evidence before the court about his client’s state of mind or whether she knew the fetuses were likely to have been born alive — a fact the Crown set out to prove in this case.

Either way, Crown attorney Buors said, “you can’t save human remains.”

The offence of concealing a child’s body — which carries a maximum two-year sentence — prohibits “dispos(ing) of the dead body of a child, with intent to conceal the fact that its mother has been delivered of it, whether the child died before, during or after birth.”

In the Crown’s interpretation of the law, that includes stillborn babies, but the Crown had to prove that the six infants could likely have been born alive. Giesbrecht would have been well aware of the gestational age of the fetuses, the Crown argued, pointing to Giesbrecht’s multiple pregnancies – two children, 10 abortions and a number of miscarriages.

“The life experience of this woman with respect to pregnancies, I would submit, is significant,” she said.

DNA evidence suggests Andrea Giesbrecht and her husband, Jeremy Giesbrecht, are the parents of the babies found in the storage locker, although the Crown wasn’t required to prove that in this case.

Referencing previous testimony from Giesbrecht’s friends, her husband and her youngest son — who all told court they didn’t know about the existence of the six babies — as well as medical records that showed discrepancies in the number of her pregnancies Giesbrecht chose to reveal to her doctors, Buors described a woman who went to “extreme efforts” to hide pregnancies.

“All of this evidence, I would suggest to the court, clearly demonstrates the efforts that Andrea Giesbrecht went to conceal these pregnancies and subsequent births to people in her immediate circle, to medical professionals, to society at large. There was extreme efforts to conceal these pregnancies,” she said.

The Crown also stayed a breach charge against Giesbrecht, leaving the six counts of concealing a child’s body.

The judge is set to deliver his verdict in February. The decision will be broadcast live, as a result of a successful motion by Global TV for the judge to allow one camera into the courtroom.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay