Giesbrecht charged with six counts of conceiling a child's body

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Andrea Giesbrecht found guilty in dead-infants case

By: Katie May
Posted: 02/6/2017 1:25 PM | Last Modified: 02/6/2017 2:55 PM | Updates | Comments: 22

Andrea Giesbrecht was charged with six counts of concealing a child's body.

A Winnipeg mother accused of keeping dead babies in storage has been found guilty.
Andrea Giesbrecht, 42, was convicted of six counts of concealing a child's body as provincial court Judge Murray Thompson delivered his decision Monday afternoon.
The six babies' bodies were stored in an attempt to conceal the smell of human decay and to hide their very existence, the judge said.
"I am satisfied that the only logical and rational conclusion to be drawn from this evidence is that Giesbrecht would have been aware that each child was likely to have been born alive," the judge said.
How the infants died couldn't be determined, but during a lengthy trial that wrapped up in October, medical experts testified the babies were likely born alive. Their decomposed remains — some no more than bones — were found in garbage bags contained in plastic containers inside a McPhillips Street storage locker two years earlier in October 2014.
Staff at the U-Haul storage facility made the grisly discovery when they entered the unit to prepare its contents for auction after Giesbrecht had missed several rental payments. The storage unit was rented in her name and she was arrested after a Winnipeg Police Service investigation. She has been free on bail since April 2015.

Provincial court Judge Murray Thompson reads the verdict from the case of 42-year-old Andrea Giesbrecht, who is accused of storing the remains of six infants — five boys and a girl, Monday, February 6, 2017 in a livestream feed to media outlets.

On the final day of Giesbrecht’s trial last fall, her defence lawyer, Greg Brodsky, said his client did store the human remains but didn’t have any criminal intent.
"She could have got rid of them. She wanted to keep them," he said at the time.
Either way, Crown prosecutor Debbie Buors argued, "You can’t save human remains."
The trial began in April and ended in early October, with several delays in between. It was initially reported the charges against Giesbrecht could be upgraded to include homicide offences, but that never materialized. The Crown couldn't prove its theory the babies were disposed of in garbage bags after they were born, Buors said during the trial. Brodsky argued all of the six babies were stillborn.

TREVOR HAGAN/WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES
U-Haul self storage lockers at Elgin Avenue and McPhillips Street, where human remains were discovered inside a delinquent unit. Purchase Photo Print

The case hinged on the Crown's ability to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the six infants were likely born alive. Buors argued Giesbrecht would have been well aware of the gestational age of the fetuses given her multiple pregnancies — two children, 10 abortions and a number of miscarriages. The trial heard from Giesbrecht's husband Jeremy Giesbrecht, who said his wife never told him she was pregnant with their oldest child — he found out via a call from the hospital the day their son was born — as well as from one of her two sons, who said he never saw his mother pregnant. The Crown used these and other testimonies from Andrea's friends to try to paint a picture of her secrecy around pregnancy.
A conviction on the offence of concealing a child’s body carries a maximum two-year sentence. The law prohibits "dispos(ing) of the dead body of a child, with intent to conceal the fact that its mother has been delivered of it, whether the child died before, during or after birth."
katie.may@freepress.mb.ca
Twitter: @thatkatiemay

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