When Shelly Flemal is sentenced this week in Weber County, she will likely join six other northern Utah women in prison for taking a life.
Flemal pleaded guilty last month to first-degree felony murder in the 1994 death of her 3-year-old daughter, Courtney Jo. The child's body was found under a bush in a cemetery; Flemal claimed innocence for more than 18 months.Second District Court Judge W. Brent West was to sentence Flemal Thursday afternoon.
Two other imprisoned northern Utah women also killed children.
Victoria Thornton is in prison for beating a 3-year-old girl so severely in 1993 that her liver ruptured, her kidney split in two and the child bled to death. Keanna Charlene Cowper of Ogden was in Thornton's care while the child's mother was in prison.
Thornton pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to up to 15 years in prison on the second-degree felony. At a parole hearing last year, the board gave her a release date of 11 years from now.
Ok Kum Burns remains in prison for stabbing her 3-year-old son, Joshua, to death in June 1994 at their Layton home.
A Korean immigrant, Burns said cultural isolation and the stigma of her pending divorce propelled her to take the boy's life and attempt to take her own. Her next hearing isn't scheduled until June 2004.
Altogether, 17 female killers are behind bars in Utah.
The oldest and the one behind bars the longest is Rita Manuel, who was 60 when she plunged a 14-inch butcher knife through the body of man who attacked her in the kitchen of her sister's home.
Manuel and the victim had agreed to a price for oral sex, but Manuel said David Frisby began kicking her and choking her.
She got a knife and stabbed him.
Her younger sister got a snow shovel and began hitting him.
Manuel, convicted of murder, got life in prison at her sentencing in 1981. She is now awaiting a competency examination.
Her sister was convicted of manslaughter, received a 15-year-sentence and was paroled after just two years.
Linda S. Petersen stabbed her live-in boyfriend, Michel Bertrand, in the chest with a knife in 1989. She claimed self-defense in the Layton killing.
Though convicted of murder, she was sentenced as if the crime were manslaughter and was given up to 15 years in prison. She has a parole hearing set for April 1997.
Badgered and coerced into murder, Kittie Eakes has been in prison for more than decade after receiving a life sentence.
Eakes was tried as the only killer of Sharon Wetzel, an Ogden woman found shot to death in her car in November 1985. Then, once Eakes got into therapy at the prison, she contacted prosecutors, and her testimony led to the murder conviction against Jon Thomas Wetzel.
At a parole hearing last fall, the board noted the progress Eakes had made in prison, the prosecutors' recommendations she be released and her remorse over the crime. She has a parole date of October 1997.