A woman accused of abandoning her newborn baby in a gravel pit nearly 40 years ago has pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Prosecutors agreed to reduce the charge from murder after a settlement conference in March. Lee Ann Daigle, 59, pleaded guilty to the new charge in Aroostook County on Thursday, waiving her right to an indictment and a jury trial.
Lee Ann Daigle Photo courtesy of Maine State Police
Daigle will be sentenced on June 20. She could face up to 20 years in state prison, according to her attorney, Hunter Tzovarras. She will remain free on a $50,000 cash bail while awaiting sentencing and is under GPS monitoring.
Other than to say she was aware of what she was pleading to and that she was doing it of her own free will, Daigle’s comments Thursday were brief.
Tzovarras expects she will have more to share at her sentencing.
“It was an emotional, difficult day for Lee,” Tzovarras said in a statement Thursday. “She is remorseful for what happened 37 years ago. It was difficult for her to hear the details of that night and morning as recited in the prosecution version. Lee has always believed the baby was stillborn and has taken responsibility, through the manslaughter plea, for not seeking help or medical treatment at the time.”
Meanwhile, the Office of the Maine Attorney General laid out what it would have presented at trial had Daigle not entered a plea.
Maine State Police were called to a Frenchville home in December 1985 after a couple’s dog left the body of a newborn on their front lawn. The baby appeared to have been delivered full term and was found “unclothed, unswaddled, and partially frozen,” Assistant Attorney General Lara Nomani said.
Police found a large pool of blood, a placenta, tire tracks, and footprints in a gravel pit about 1,000 feet from the house. This is where investigators believed someone had delivered and then abandoned the baby.
A medical examiner at the time determined that the baby’s death was a homicide. Another examiner recently reviewed the files and couldn’t rule out the possibility that the baby was stillborn, which Daigle had said she believed at the time.
“But all data and facts show Doe was likely born alive and died as a result of exposure to an extremely cold environment,” Nomani said.
It wasn’t until 36 years later that the Maine State Police Crime Lab identified the baby’s biological father through DNA testing. He has never been publicly identified. The following year, a genealogical specialist recommended police request a DNA sample from Daigle, believing she was either related to the baby or the biological mother.
Nomani said Daigle refused to submit to a DNA test at first, “emphatically denied” she was the mother, and said she was living in New Hampshire at the time the baby was delivered.
In interviews with the Press Herald after Daigle’s arrest last summer, her family said Daigle told them she had no recollection of how the baby was conceived or of giving birth, and that she had likely blocked it out because it was so traumatic. She later said she might have been drugged and raped.
But throughout several interviews with investigators, Daigle would later change her statements and agree to a DNA test, which showed she was likely the baby’s mother.
Daigle also later admitted to delivering the baby in Frenchville and that she was aware by that fall that she was pregnant and felt movement as of November. According to prosecutors, Daigle eventually said the baby could have been the result of a brief relationship.
Daigle told investigators she never shared her experience with anyone – not her friends, not the man she would later marry, nor her doctors or family. She also told police that she had been considering her options at the time and was aware abandonment would likely result in the baby’s death.
Nomani recited several fragments of Daigle’s recorded interviews with police, all of which Nomani said would have been played for a jury had there been a trial.
“Why did you leave her there? Why hide her so she wouldn’t be found?” police asked at one point.
“Maybe embarrassment,” Daigle told police. “That’s the only thing I could explain. Because then I would explain … have to explain (to) baby’s father, everything.”
A few years later, she and the man she would later marry, John Daigle, moved to New Hampshire, where they would have two children who are now in their 30s.
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