A Michigan woman was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Tuesday in the 2003 murder of her newborn twin sons, who were left for dead in a trash bin in southwest suburban Stickney Township.
Antoinette Briley, 44, pleaded guilty to murder at a hearing Tuesday and was sentenced to 20 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections, the Cook County sheriff’s office said.
The twin boys were found June 6, 2003, by a Waste Management employee who was emptying trash bins in an alley in the 4800 block of South Latrobe Avenue. Their deaths were ruled homicides after autopsies revealed the boys had been born alive and died of asphyxiation, officials said.
The sheriff’s office had investigated but could not find a suspect at the time.
However, Detective Ginny Georgantas, the lead investigator on the case, had said she asked to reopen the investigation in 2018 after genetic genealogy technology was used to identify serial murderer Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. as the Golden State Killer in California.
The technique was used to identify Briley as a potential birth mother of the twins.
Detectives then went to Holland, Michigan, spotted Briley smoking a cigarette, and retrieved the butt to use to collect a sample of her DNA — which matched that of the twin boys.
Local
Briley was arrested in 2020 when investigators learned she would be in Oak Lawn, and she was charged with two counts of first-degree murder. After her arrest Briley admitted her involvement in the death of the boys and the disposal of their bodies, sheriff’s officials said.
Briley told detectives she knew she was pregnant that day in 2003, and that she had been at her grandfather’s house when she began to feel abdominal pains. She got in a bathtub and gave birth. The babies were crying “but not loud enough that the neighbors could hear,” she told investigators.
Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weekly Chicago Catch-Up newsletter here.
After cleaning herself up, Briley placed the newborns into a duffel bag and got into a car to drive to a hospital.
But she told detectives she changed her mind on the way, thinking that because no one knew that she had given birth, “no one would ever have to know.” She told detectives she took the babies out of the bag, left them in a trash bin and drove back to her grandfather’s house.
Briley allegedly told detectives in 2020 that “she wishes she could take the whole day back” and that she had kept driving to the hospital instead.
