Woman pleads guilty in Missouri incest case with Oklahoma ties
BY Associated Press
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
HARRISONVILLE, Mo. — A woman whose husband fathered four babies with one of the couple's daughters has entered a guilty plea in western Missouri.
Online court records show the woman will be sentenced Tuesday. She pleaded guilty Friday in Cass County Circuit Court to child endangerment and hindering prosecution of a felony.
The Associated Press is not identifying the defendant to protect the identity of the victims,
Her husband was sentenced last June to life in prison after he was convicted of charges that included second-degree murder, second-degree rape, two counts of incest and two counts of abandonment of a corpse.
Three of the four children the man had with his daughter died, including one who fell off a couch, another who got sick and didn't get proper medical attention, and one who was stillborn. The murder charge stemmed from the death of the child who died after falling ill.
Prosecutors accused the mother of knowing of the abuse but doing nothing to stop it.
The daughter, now in her early 20s, testified at her father's trial that her father first had sex with her when she was 5 years old. She said she gave birth to her first child, a daughter, at age 14. The girl died four months later after falling off a couch in the recreational vehicle the family lived in.
Two years later she had a son — the only one of her children who survived. A year later, she had another son, but he died after becoming ill and not receiving medical attention.
His body and that of the victim's fourth child, a daughter who was stillborn, were found in January 2009 in coolers on the rural Harrisonville property where the family — the defendant, the victim, her mother and three sisters — lived in their recreational vehicle. The body of a third infant was recovered in a wooden box in a shallow grave near Dustin in eastern Oklahoma, where the family also apparently lived for a short time.
Calls to the mother's attorney, Angela Weatherford, weren't immediately returned.
