41-year-old woman pleads guilty to hiding remains of her 2 dead babies in trash bags

A 41-year-old North Carolina woman, who was accused of hiding trash bags containing the remains of her two dead infants under a Smithfield home, has pleaded guilty on Thursday (7 December).

According to the News and Observer website, the babies were first discovered in April 2016 and the woman, Bridgette Morgan Smith, was charged in June this year.

Pamela McBride, Smith's mother had rented the home on Hartley Drive where the remains were found.

McBride's son was the one to spot the trash bags while he was installing cables in the crawl space beneath her home. She told authorities that her daughter was a drug addict and has been pregnant approximately 10 times.

She said she could only name three children that resulted from those pregnancies, according to the website. McBride added that she had the custody of two of the children, an 8-year-old girl and a toddler boy.

Smith told the police that both the children were her own and she had delivered them inside the bathroom of her mother's home.

According to her, both the infants appeared dead at birth and therefore she got frightened and wrapped them in towels. Smith then placed them in trash bags and hid them beneath the house, the website stated. The two infants would have been about three and five years old today if they had survived.

The state medical examiner's office said that they were not able to determine whether the children were dead or alive, but evidence suggests that they were alive at birth.

"This defendant showed an utter disregard for the lives of her children," Johnston County District Attorney Susan Doyle said during Smith's court appearance on Thursday. "She chose to treat them like trash."