Posted on 01/13/2012 10:06:15 AM PST by raccoonradio
January 13, 2012 — BRENTWOOD, N.H. (AP) — A Texas woman was sentenced Friday to 45 years in prison for suffocating her 6-year-old son in a New Hampshire motel room and leaving his body along a dirt road in Maine.
The discovery of Camden Hughes' body last May set off a nationwide effort to identify him. Meanwhile, his mother, Julianne McCrery, called his kindergarten daily to report him absent with appendicitis.
McCrery, 42, of Irving, Texas, later told prosecutors she had planned to kill herself and that she killed Camden because no one else was fit to raise him. But prosecutors say they have evidence McCrery felt the boy was an inconvenience and that she planned to go about her own life after killing him.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Susan Morrell questioned McCrery's assertion that she planned to kill herself by ingesting potentially lethal castor beans. Morrell pointed out that McCrery had attempted suicide several years earlier by the same means and had failed.
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"This case raises more questions than there are answers for," Morrell said. McCrery spoke tearfully at her sentencing hearing, calling her son "extraordinary." "I am very sorry to have caused the intense pain and suffering to my precious son Camden," she said. "He did nothing whatsoever to deserve that by my hand, and he was not an inconvenience to me.
"My sorrow is intense and unbearable." Defense attorney Julia Nye said an insanity defense was considered, but McCrery rejected that option. "She chose to accept responsibility for her actions," Nye said.
McCrery pleaded guilty in November to kneeling atop her son as he laid face-down on the floor of their motel room floor in Hampton, N.H. She told investigators she covered his mouth with her hand as he struggled to survive. Morrell said the pressure McCrery applied to Camden was so great it bruised one lung and the base of his skull.
McCrery's son and brother both told her during remarks to the court that they love and forgive her. Her brother, Chris Hughes, asked Superior Court Judge Tina Nadeau to shorten the sentence a bit so her other son, Ian McCrery, "might possibly have some time with her."
Nadeau held to the agreed upon 45-year sentence, adding, "There's nothing I can say here today to lessen the devastation." Julianne McCrery thanked a family from South Berwick, Maine, for discovering Camden's body and later starting a children's charity in his memory. She called them "angels on earth" for trying to bring some comfort to her son.
Lisa Gove was en route to her in-laws' house on a remote road on May 14 when she noticed a pickup truck with its doors open, bearing a Navy insignia. She and her in-laws soon discovered his body, which was under a green blanket 30 feet from the road.
Gove's detailed description of the truck and the Navy insignia led a driver at a Chelmsford, Mass., truck stop to spot McCrery's truck on May 18 with her inside. When she was questioned, McCrery identified herself and told police she had killed her son at a Hampton motel and left his body under a green blanket by the side of the road.
"Life as I knew it ended May 18, 2011," her mother, Lu Rae McCrery, told the judge Friday. "Camden's life, I believe, was taken in a misguided moment. We will never be whole again." Lu Rae McCrery said after court that she had at least one phone conversation with her daughter but had no idea she had left Texas with Camden and had driven to New England.
Without Gove's chance observation, Morrell said, "it was highly unlikely he would have been found." Julianne McCrery said it has taken a while for her grief to fully unfold, but now it is "excruciating."
Texas public records show that she was arrested at least twice on prostitution charges and once for possession with intent to distribute drugs. In 2009, she was sentenced to one year in prison for a misdemeanor conviction of prostitution. In 2004, she was sentenced to three years of probation for a felony conviction of possession of a controlled substance.
Morrell acknowledged that McCrery did not have an easy life but said investigators could not determine what led her to consider suicide. McCrery spent the drive from Texas to New England contemplating how she would kill her son, the prosecutor said.
She said McCrery extinguished a bright star "before he even had the chance to graduate from kindergarten."
In this story from last May it’s said that McCrery didn’t know who the father of her son Camden was and she has a son, now 23 or so, who is a Navy chef in Virginia. Not sure where the last name “Hughes” came from (she had an ex-boyfriend named
Robert Miller). McCrery also tried suicide attempts by way of carbon monoxide poisoning and drug overdose.
I think the couple who found the boy’s body said they would have adopted the child...
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111108/GJNEWS_01/711089936
>>SOUTH BERWICK, Maine — Manley Gove is not angry at Julianne McCrery. He said he only wishes she would have dropped off her son, Camden Pierce Hughes, on his and his wife Linda’s front steps so they could have raised him like their own son, rather than taking his life.
“People make horrific decisions,” said Gove. “But I think that doesn’t make them bad people. I really think that people, deep down, are good.”
The Goves, of Dennett Road in South Berwick, were the unfortunate ones to find the body of Camden in a wooded area near the end of their driveway on May 14.
>>Her brother, Chris Hughes
prob where the Hughes name came from
Actually we're all, deep down, rotten to the core. Our wretchedness only varies by degrees. God either sees us as lost (in Adam) or found (in Christ).
That said, premeditated murder deserves death and here we have another woman who has escaped that sentence. Kant believed that a society unwilling to sentence a murderer to death in effect becomes an accomplice of the crime.
God can redeem this woman for sure (and I hope He does) but society should execute her.
immorality: meet the consequences....
sadly,its always seems to be the children that suffer the brunt of the consequences...
the male who is the father is off in la la land somewhere, never knowing that his offspring suffered a horrendous death...
we have a grown son and a grandmother having lost close relatives..
and we have another inmate to feed and cloth for the next 35 yrs...
I've got some old two-stroke motorcycle oil I'll be happy to send her if she ever gets serious about it...
Some Texas rancher has a forgotten bottle of strycnine in a shed.
45 years? Proving that children are not people. You kill anyone else the same way she killed this child and you get life in prison or the death penalty.;
Why is it that killing a baby is considered less of a crime?
Thank abortion for that I guess.
She was fortunate not to have committed the crime in Texas. We have worse punishments.
In Maine this guys computer generated image was splashed all over the place until he was identified. It horrified everyone because you could tell it was a cleaned up image of his little body on an autopsy table. She doesn’t ever deserve to have freedom as long as she lives. I do wish the NE would learn that this woman killed her son up here because she would have got the death penalty that she so richly deserved if she would have murdered her son at home.
“45 years? Proving that children are not people. You kill anyone else the same way she killed this child and you get life in prison or the death penalty.;”
Nope it does not prove that children are not people but does prove that women routinely get a sentencing discount for crimes, that if committed by a man would result in much more severe sentences. Can you imagine the same statements like asking for a shorter sentence so that a father that just killed his son could spend time with the son he didn’t kill? Not bloody likely! This is all about giving women a pass when it comes to punishing them for crimes that they commit, nothing more, nothing less.
Been saying this for years, women get far lighter sentences than men for identical types of crimes. They cry, talk about being insane, eyes tear up, make and female judges buy this crap all the time. Females tend to look better and prettier than the male criminals and more people buy this junk from them.
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