[tense music]
[sirens wail]
- The dispatcher came across the radio, she said that
the complainant on the phone had just
located a miscarriage
of some sort, in a box.
[tense music]
When we pulled up to the home, there was a truck
and a trailer parked there, like a utility trailer.
And the garage door was open
and it looked as if the family were
just doing spring cleaning.
A lot of boxes from the garage were out on the driveway.
I made contact with Darren and the family.
Darren seemed beside himself, kind of like
he didn't know really what to do with what was occurring.
- Darren told us he was in the process
of being released from prison.
He had his family there helping him prepare to move home.
His parents owned the home and his sister
and brother-in-law lived in the basement prior
to going to prison.
Darren, his wife, Megan, and their daughters
lived in the home.
- I immediately asked where the box in question was at.
It was pointed towards the front of the garage.
It was a fruit box, like an apple box.
It had electrical tape wrapped around the outside of it.
There was actually a box and then a bag close to it.
Darren said that bag had been removed from the box.
I remember looking inside the bag
and noticing the double layers of bags.
- [Dan] The garbage bags were also taped.
And so when they had opened up the tape to see what was
inside these bags, that's where they found a deceased baby.
- It was obvious that it was in a stage of decomposition,
but it looked like a human child.
[ominous music]
- Officers looked at the baby
and speculated that it could be full term,
but they didn't feel comfortable removing it from the bags
and really examining it closely.
- So we contacted the medical examiner's office
and they sent out an investigator.
Bewilderment, shock.
I was speechless.
How could you fathom something like that?
The big obvious question is,
what is this child doing here?
Who's the mother, where did it come from?
- We didn't know what was going on
and when we seen all the policemen there,
we just thought someone was hurt.
When they told us that they had found a dead baby
in the box, we were in so much shock that we just
couldn't believe it.
- We shut the scene down.
It's not every day you find a deceased infant child wrapped
in plastic in a box in your garage.
So absolutely, we looked at it as suspicious.
- It's a very somber mood.
We don't know whether it is a homicide or not,
but we're gonna investigate it as if it were.
- We started going through the garage box by box.
Try to see if there's anything that would suggest
to us why this child was here.
The state of the garage was extremely disheveled,
very cluttered.
There were boxes from floor to ceiling on all three walls,
which there was a moment where I paused
and looked around the garage
and thought, there's hundreds of boxes,
how are we gonna get through all of these in one day?
- Darren relayed to the officers that he called Megan
and Megan had told him that it was his baby that she had
after he went to prison back in 2006.
- We learned Megan and Darren were married
for about 21 years
and had several children over the course of their marriage.
But Megan and Darren lived in the home together
for quite a long time.
- All the neighborhood was confused.
It just seemed like a normal family.
They kept to themselves mostly
and most of us couldn't believe, is this happening on our street?
When it's such a quiet, peaceful families.
It was so shocking to all of us.
Poor Darren looked awful.
Like, I don't believe what I just found.
It just broke my heart.
- That is not normal.
So Officer Abegg called Megan on the phone and spoke with her.
- We are trying to be sympathetic to her,
but as police officers, we're tasked
with investigating a crime and the reality was
that she didn't properly dispose of a body.
And so, were we looking at desecration of a body?
We needed to find all the facts.
[tense music]
Going into the interview, my goal was to understand why
a baby was hidden instead of having called the authorities,
or gone to a doctor,
or any of those other options that it seems that any
of which would've been a better choice.
- She seemed overwhelmed
and I actually perceived the emotions as genuine.
Next, I wanted to understand, did she want this baby to live?
Did she make lifesaving efforts?
- My perception was that this very well
may just be a stillbirth and a terrible series of decisions.
Her husband's in prison, she's alone.
She has this baby at home, she's a single mother of three,
and she saw it as the only way to handle the situation.
But at the same time, she wasn't making a lot of eye contact
and I did feel like she was withholding information
and not being completely honest with me,
and I didn't know why.
[tense music]
- I was trying to understand her mindset.
So for her to say, "Proper closure is burial
and me going to jail," that was the first indicator
that her mindset could have been criminal.
[ominous music]
- I remember there being some sort of form of tape over it.
And then as we opened it up, there's heavy padding
and packaging, more plastic wrap.
As we got deeper into that box,
we did ultimately find a second child.
I felt angry and...
I remember thinking,
what in the actual hell is going on?
- The manner in which the babies were packaged
created some suspicion that this might be
more than just a stillborn baby.
Concern was she was concealing a guilty conscience.
And that's why she went to the extent that she did
to conceal those babies in their location.
[knocking]
There was a knock at the door and it was an investigator
who asked me to come out of the room.
That investigator told me that
while conducting the search warrant at the house,
that they had found a second baby.
[tense music]
So when I came back into the room,
I took a huge sigh,
recognizing that if I showed emotion or judgment,
it could shut Megan down.
I wanted to ensure that she didn't feel like
I was being critical or judgmental.
[tense music]
- I didn't think she was telling the truth
about not being able to remember.
But I continued a softer approach.
I had to maintain this relationship of trust
and not come across as skeptical.
[somber music]
- We had information come into us
that there were a total of four children in that garage,
which we had not found yet.
But we knew that this was a bigger-scaled investigation
than we initially thought.
We had upwards of probably 20 or 30 people at the house
going through every nook and cranny,
closet, attics, basement,
anywhere you could think of to hide anything.
Something like this is not something
you wanna make a mistake on.
[tense music]
Most people that I interrogate,
I have probable cause that they've committed a crime
or I know a lot of the answers.
And in this case, I still wasn't certain
whether everything she was telling me was true.
It was a delicate balance between trying to recognize
when she was withholding information,
and whether that was intentional or a result of drug use,
of passage of time, possibly mental illnesses.
- At this point, because of the atmosphere in the room
or the way that she was talking to me,
I suspected they weren't all miscarriages
or that they were all stillborn.
I'm now thinking not only has she hidden these babies,
but she hid the fact that they were born.
That was the first moment that I felt
that she may have ended these babies' lives.
I do believe that having spent 90 minutes now
establishing this trust and information eliciting,
I continued that pattern and went for more details.
It didn't make sense.
There was help available,
that she didn't reach out to.
If she wanted these babies to live,
any other choice would have been better.
[tense music]
- I've never asked somebody
if they've killed somebody before.
But I took a several second pause.
I knew that this was a make or break question,
and that hesitation was actually me trying
to decide if it was the right moment to ask it.
I took a break because of the emotions that I was feeling.
I was overwhelmed by the fact that a woman
did something so unthinkable to her newborn babies.
Once I'm out of her sight, my hands went to my knees
and I had to take several breaths to really process.
Holy (bleep), she had killed these babies.
[tense music]
- This was probably one of the longest days in my career.
It was emotionally straining,
physically exhausting.
And the feeling in the air was dread,
but also determination to find out
what in the hell actually had happened.
Eventually, we found baby number three.
[ominous music]
Baby number three was packaged
a lot more tightly than the others.
It was several layers worth of duct tape.
Once we got the box open,
there was again the the plastic vinyl bag
and my heart just sunk.
And I thought, dear God, please no, not another one.
[eerie music]
- I'm told that there is a fifth baby found at the home.
Now it's becoming almost exhausting.
How many could there be, and what is going on?
[tense music]
- As I was talking to Megan, I'm starting to wonder,
okay, well, how much Darren knew.
I was aware that
they didn't have a chance to get their story straight.
And so, I was interested in what she did feel
that his knowledge and or culpability may or may not be.
- Okay.
I didn't believe that Darren just happened
to find this baby and had no other knowledge
of how or where it could have come from.
I'm under the suspicion that he knew
more than even what Megan knew he knew.
[suspenseful music]
[tense music]
- It was hard to grasp and to fathom.
I just remembered just being in shock
that we kept finding babies.
Six, and then finally seven, and it was horrific.
[tense music]
- A total of seven children had been found in the garage.
We went to every exhaustive measure
trying to determine if there were more
than just the seven children we found.
We did a search at her home in West Valley.
We used cadaver dogs at multiple locations,
and ultimately, we didn't find anything
more than the seven found in her garage.
Megan was exhausted.
She hadn't accepted food or water all day
and we had made our case.
And so at that point, I do inform her
that she's going to jail for murder.
[tense music]
- She's only charged with six because she maintained
that one of the babies was stillborn.
[tense music]
- I really wanted to understand how much Darren knew.
Was he complicit and did he tell her to do it?
Did he tell her to get rid of them, or was he so aloof
and disconnected that it was convenient that they were gone?
In talking with Darren, I had to be aware of the fact
that having the criminal history that he did,
if he felt that I was trying to implicate him,
that he would immediately request counsel.
So, I was very careful
because I wanted to earn his trust.
- His reaction was very emotional.
His head went in his hands.
And I actually perceived that as genuine,
that he was not aware that there was seven.
However, I didn't believe that he just happened
to find this baby and had no other knowledge
of how or where it could have come from.
[pensive music]
- As officers, death notifications
are very difficult.
And this was one that I didn't really view it
as a death notification until I had done it.
And I actually kind of felt badly
that that's how Darren found out
that he had fathered seven other children
that he didn't even know about.
[tense music]
My perspective of Darren at that point was
that I truly didn't know how much more he knew,
but there was no evidence that Darren helped Megan.
Also, considering the fact that if he knew
that there were bodies in his garage,
he wouldn't be cleaning his garage on a 48-hour pass.
So, he was released.
[tense music]
We had sent all of the evidence
that would preserve a fingerprint,
tape, plastic bags, things from the boxes
that may have DNA on it,
and the FBI did analyze all of that for us.
Every fingerprint that the FBI found was Megan's.
- Ultimately, Darren was cleared
of any involvement in the case.
[tense music]
- Our goal from the beginning of this
was to ensure justice for these babies.
- [Anchor] And tonight, justice for six babies
killed right after birth by their own mother,
as she pleads guilty to six counts of murder.
- And the judge gave her the maximum sentence
that could keep her locked up for the rest of her life.
- [Man] Megan having admitted to killing all but one,
she was sentenced to six five-to-lifes,
to be served consecutively.
She's going to prison for the rest of her life.
- Megan had a family that she was raising,
but on the flip side of that coin,
she also had seven dead children in her garage
that she had murdered.
I don't know what her motive was.
I don't care what her motive was,
but the fact of the matter is she did it,
and that was unfathomable to me.
- Neighbors tonight are in absolute shock.
- I mean, I just can't even believe
that even Megan would be capable of such a thing.
[pensive music]
- All of us were so surprised to find out
that she had had seven pregnancies,
and that none of us knew.
That was a shock in itself.
- This whole event was very traumatic for our community.
Something snapped in her brain.
I still haven't come to terms with it.
- It was heartbreaking to me because,
I mean, our church is so based on family.
Our belief is families are forever.
This is our nice little Pleasant Grove.
How could this happen in this community?
- At the end of the day, there are things
that can never be fully explained in this case.
[somber music]
- A few years later,
they did have a memorial for the babies.
Darren's parents did decide
to give all the babies a name,
which was great,
and I'm glad they done that.