Shelly Flemal, the Ogden mother who publicly pleaded for her missing daughter's safe return only to later confess to the girl's murder, has been sentenced to prison.
Flemal sat quietly and declined to address the court as 2nd District Judge Brent West on Thursday ordered her to serve a five-year-to-life term for the 1994 slaying of her 3-year-old daughter, Courtney Jo."My conclusion is that you belong in prison," West told a courtroom packed with Flemal's friends and angry Ogdenites who believed the 24-year-old woman was getting off too easy.
West said he took into account that Flemal herself was abused as a child, and that she was a drug addict with limited mental abilities. Even so, he said, "The responsibilities of a parent are to love, nurture and care. Not to kill."
Flemal pleaded guilty to murder, a first-degree felony, March 18 in a plea-bargain agreement in which the Weber County Attorney's Office said it would recommend she serve no more than six years in prison with credit for the 16 months she has been in jail.
West agreed to accept the plea but pointed out that the amount of time Flemal ultimately spends in prison depends on the Utah State Board of Pardons and Parole.
Flemal went to police the morning of June 4, 1994, and said her daughter had disappeared from the playground at Ogden's Liberty Park. The report sparked a communitywide search with hundreds of volunteers combing nearby neighborhoods as Flemal pleaded for her daughter's safe return.
Three days later, however, the girl's body, swaddled in a blanket, was found beneath a bush near the city cemetery. Six months later, Flemal was charged with murder.
An autopsy showed the child was a victim of homicide, but the medical examiner could not determine a cause of death.
Defense attorney Bernie Allen said Flemal was drug-addled and on a methamphetamine binge when she took the child to bed with her. The baby was dead the next morning, she said.
"Shelly says she does not know what happened, and we believe her," Allen said. "She accepts responsibility for C.J.'s death and she expects and feels she deserves prison time."
The defense thought it might have been able to obtain a manslaughter conviction had the case gone to trial, but that Flemal insisted on taking the prosecution's plea bargain offer.
While she's been in jail, he said, Flemal has begun attending school and goes to church. She is also taking anger management classes.
Court records show Flemal had a prior history of child abuse. In 1989, her son Tyler was taken from her by state child protection workers after he had been hospitalized with a broken arm, broken leg and a skull fractured in eight places.
Flemal never visited the child during his two-week hospitalization.
She also had been reported for allegedly neglecting and abusing Courtney Jo, but social workers did not find enough evidence to take the girl from her mother's custody.