Mother charged with killing two newborns
CANADICE, New York (AP) -- Stacy DeBeer told relatives she was pregnant. But when a baby failed to materialize months later, a suspicious relative snooping around DeBeer's basement found a newborn's body -- entombed in concrete.
DeBeer, 30, was arraigned Tuesday on charges of killing two of her infants -- in June 1998 and May 2003 -- and hiding them in pails filled with concrete that investigators had to break apart with hammers.
Her 32-year-old husband, Brian DeBeer, was charged with hindering prosecution by helping hide the first infant, a girl, in a garden shed.
The couple, who have children ages 8 and 6, were arrested in January after their unidentified relative discovered the body of the baby born in 2003 at their home in Farmington in rural northwestern New York, said an investigator who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"It's creepy. I guess you just don't know people nowadays," said Wayne Ciluffo, 50, an unemployed truck driver who lived next door to the DeBeers in Canadice in the late 1990s.
Grand jury indictments accused DeBeer of delivering a girl without medical help in June 1998 and killing her by stuffing paper in her mouth, wrapping her in cloth and placing her in a plastic bag.
Police suspect she kept the dead infant for nearly five years before disposing of it at her house in Canadice, where the couple lived until a fire burned down their house in June and they moved to Farmington.
Last May 11, a few weeks before the fire, she gave birth again, killed the child and took the body with her when she moved to Farmington, police say. The sex of that child was not revealed.
DeBeer gave birth to a fifth child in 2001 and gave her up for adoption, police said. Asked if she might have disposed of any other newborns, prosecutor R. Michael Tantillo said, "We can't be blind to that possibility."
The couple pleaded innocent at separate arraignments. DeBeer was ordered held without bail. Bail for her husband, a home builder, was set at $75,000 cash.
If convicted, she could be sentenced to up to 25 years to life in prison.
"Whether we can contest (the charges) at all, I'm not going to comment at this point," said her attorney, Robert Zimmerman.
Debbie Manrique, 41, who used to live next to the DeBeers in Canadice, said some of her neighbors wondered whether DeBeer suffered from postpartum depression.
"To be carting the dead infants around does not show someone is emotionally balanced. You can almost try to reason that there was insanity involved," she said.
"But you give a burial place to your gerbil or your goldfish when they die," she added. "It's disgusting to me they would bury their babies in cement and leave them."
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