Winnebago County Judge John
Truitt handed down the sentence to 32-year-old Katie Stockton of Illinois on
Friday.
Stockton's infant became known as
Baby Crystal after her frozen remains were found.
Stockton pleaded guilty in
February to first-degree murder in the infant's death after years of insisting
she was innocent.
She had hidden her pregnancy and
secretly gave birth to the baby in December 2004 and then stuffed the newborn
into a shopping bag and left her along a roadway in frigid conditions.
Under Illinois state law she
could have abandoned the baby at any designated safehouse without any questions
being asked.
Police interviewed Stockton about
Baby Crystal's death in 2004 after the child's frozen remains were found along
a dead-end road near the Stockton family home.
Prosecutors said when detectives
interviewed her hours after the discovery, she lifted her shirt and asked if
she looked like she had just given birth.
Stockton refused to provide a DNA
sample but detectives investigating the death collected evidence from a
cigarette butt they saw her discard.
Authorities said saliva on the
cigarette butt matched blood found on the clothing with Baby Crystal.
But Stockton was not arrested in
connection with Baby Crystal's death until 2009.
The Rockford Register Star
reports Judge Truitt allowed testimony during Friday's sentencing hearing about
skeletal remains of two other baby girls found years after Baby Crystal's death
in the boot of Stockton's car.
Those remains, wrapped in cloths
and stuffed underneath a spare tyre and a tyre iron, were found in 2009 - after
the car had been sitting in impound for a year.
DNA testing determined Stockton
was also probably the mother of those babies.
That testimony would not have
been allowed had Stockton stood trial.
Not worthy to be a mother.
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