Mommy Blogger Found Guilty of Murder in Poisoning Death of Her Son
Lacey Spears, the Chestnut Ridge, N.Y. mom accused of slowly poisoning her son to death while she blogged about his illness, was found guilty Monday of second degree murder, the Lower Hudson Journal News reported. Prosecutors argued that Spears killed her 5-year-old, Garnett, by putting salt in his feeding tube while he was at the hospital.
Garnett's many ailments included ear infections, unexplained fevers, seizures and digestive problems, and Spears wrote about them on her blog and on Facebook. At one point she claimed he'd been in and out of the hospital 23 times before his first birthday.
But authorities believed Spears, now 27, fabricated sickly Garnett's many issues, and that he wasn't sick at all. Her blog was full of inconsistencies and outright lies, including a story that Garnett's dad was a police officer who had died. That was news to Garnett's real father.
Although police suspected Spears suffered from Münchausen by proxy—a rare disorder that involves a parent faking a child's illness for attention, sometimes even poisoning the child to make the story more convincing—the prosecution didn't introduce the Münchausen theory at trial, saying there was enough evidence to make the case without it.
Second degree murder was the most serious charge available to the jury, carrying a minimum penalty of 15 years in prison. The Journal News reports prosecutors intend to seek the maximum sentence: 25 years.
Spears' defense attorney says she plans to appeal the conviction, and maintains "it is still a mystery" how the salt got into Garnett's stomach tube.
