The dispatch operator at Pleasant Grove Police Department had heard many disturbing calls during her career. Domestic disputes. Car accidents. Drug overdoses. But nothing could prepare her for the trembling voice on the line at 3:47 PM on April 12, 2014.

“Pleasant Grove police, what’s your emergency?”

“Yes ma’am, can I have an officer come to this address?” The man’s voice was shaking.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“My name is Darren West. I just found something in my garage. I think it’s a… a miscarriage.”

The operator paused. “Can you be more specific? What do you mean by a miscarriage?”

“I have no idea. Just please send an officer up here.”

“That sounds like you may need medical—”

“It’s been wrapped up in a plastic bag. It’s… it’s a little baby.”

As patrol cars raced toward the quiet suburban neighborhood of Pleasant Grove, Utah, officers assumed they were responding to a tragic but not uncommon scenario—perhaps a grieving mother who had lost a pregnancy and, overwhelmed by emotion, couldn’t bear to dispose of the remains properly. It was heartbreaking, certainly. But not unprecedented.

They had absolutely no idea they were about to step into what would become known as one of the most horrifying crime scenes in Utah history.

Darren West stood in his driveway, his face drained of color, hands trembling uncontrollably. The garage door gaped open behind him, revealing stacks upon stacks of cardboard boxes piled from floor to ceiling along three walls. To any neighbor walking past, it looked like a typical American garage—cluttered with the accumulated possessions of a family who had lived there for over a decade. Old holiday decorations. Forgotten sports equipment. Years of life compressed into cardboard.

But Darren knew now that wasn’t all it contained.

Officer Martinez was the first to arrive. “Sir, can you tell me what happened?”

Darren’s words tumbled out in a rush. “It’s a duplex. Basement and upstairs are separate units. My daughters live upstairs. I’ve been… I’ve been gone. Prison. I got a 48-hour pass to help my family move. I was cleaning the garage, trying to… I’ve been gone for so long, you know? And then there was this box.”

He pointed with a shaking finger to an ordinary-looking fruit box sitting just outside the garage door. Its exterior was completely covered in electrical tape—layer upon layer of it, wrapped so thoroughly it looked like someone had desperately tried to seal something away forever.

“It was all wrapped up and I thought, what is this?”

Inside the box was a bag, also meticulously wrapped in duct tape. When Officer Martinez carefully peeled it open, the smell hit him first—unmistakable and overwhelming. Then he saw it: the lifeless, fully decomposed body of an infant.

“Oh my God,” Martinez whispered.

He immediately radioed for backup, crime scene investigators, and the medical examiner’s office. Within thirty minutes, Detective Dan Beckstrom arrived. A veteran investigator with twenty years of experience, he’d seen his share of human tragedy. Child abuse cases. Domestic homicides. Gang violence. But something about this scene made every instinct in his body flare with alarm.

“There are boxes from floor to ceiling on all three walls,” he said into his radio, surveying the cluttered garage. “Hundreds of boxes. How are we going to get through all of these?”

More officers arrived. They began the painstaking, methodical process of opening box after box, never knowing what they might find. Most contained exactly what you’d expect—old books, Christmas ornaments, children’s toys. But then, two hours into the search, an officer called out from the far corner of the garage.

“Detective! We’ve got another one.”

The second body was packed tightly in a box, sealed with the same layers of duct tape. Inside, the infant was wrapped in plastic bags and covered in vinyl. A sickening pattern was emerging.

“Bewilderment. Shock. I was speechless,” one officer would later recall in a television interview. “How could you fathom something like that?”

A third body followed. Then a fourth, hidden under two blankets and two bath towels in the bottom left corner of a cubby. By the time the sun began to set over Pleasant Grove, casting long shadows across the suburban street, they had found seven bodies. Seven infants, all carefully wrapped, all deliberately hidden, all left to decompose in the darkness of an ordinary American garage.

“What in the actual hell is going on?” Detective Beckstrom said to no one in particular.

The answer lay with the one person who wasn’t there: Megan Huntsman, Darren’s estranged wife.

While Darren had been standing outside the garage in shock, officers had been frantically trying to locate Megan. She no longer lived in the Pleasant Grove house—she’d moved to West Valley City with a boyfriend after Darren went to prison in 2006. When they finally reached her by phone, her first words sent chills down the spine of everyone listening.

“It was a miscarriage. It was like nine years ago, when he first left.”

“How far into your pregnancy were you?” the officer asked carefully.

“It was born.”

The officer paused. If it was born, it wasn’t a miscarriage. That was a baby. “How soon can you come down here? Our detectives need to ask you some follow-up questions so that we can rule out any kind of foul play.”

“Okay.”

“Listen to me. I need you to stay at your residence. We’re going to have a West Valley City officer come pick you up.”

As Megan was being transported to the Pleasant Grove Police Department, Detective Beckstrom prepared himself for what he knew would be one of the most important interrogations of his career. He had seven dead infants. A husband who claimed complete ignorance. And a mother who had just admitted that what she’d called a “miscarriage” had actually been born alive.

Nothing about this made sense yet. But it was about to.

Megan Huntsman walked into the interrogation room at 7:23 PM. She was 39 years old, thin, with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked tired. Worn down by life. But not surprised to be sitting in a police interrogation room. Detective Beckstrom started gently, his voice calm and non-threatening.

“You know why we’re here. What we’re here to talk about. Just start at the beginning and tell me what happened.”

Megan took a breath. Her voice was flat, emotionless. “We were doing drugs a lot. That’s why he was in prison. I got pregnant right before he left, and I really didn’t know because I thought it was just stress and stuff. He went to prison in 2006.”

“How far along were you?”

“A couple months.”

“Where did you have the baby?”

“In the house. In the bathroom.”

She described sitting on the toilet, pushing, delivering completely alone. “The baby was blue and wasn’t crying. I was by myself and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get it to cry or anything.”

“Then what happened?”

“I got scared and I wrapped it up. Not being smart and calling you guys. I was in shock. It was stupid of me to do it.”

It sounded almost plausible. A young mother, alone, overwhelmed by drug addiction and stress, delivers a stillborn baby and panics. Makes a terrible decision in a moment of crisis. Tragic, certainly. But perhaps understandable.

Except Detective Beckstrom had just received a text message from the crime scene. They’d found a second baby.

“Megan,” he said carefully, watching her face. “We have investigators at your house right now. They found a second baby. Will you please tell me about that?”

Megan’s face crumpled. For the first time, real emotion crossed her features—not grief, but something closer to resignation. The secret she’d been carrying for nearly two decades was finally collapsing around her.

“There’s more,” she whispered.

Detective Beckstrom felt his blood run cold. “How many more?”

“I don’t even know. I was on so many drugs. I can’t remember.”

The detective’s phone buzzed again. Another text from the scene. “Megan. They’re up to five now.”

She closed her eyes. “There could be more. Like I said, I can’t remember. How many do you think there would be?”

“You tell me.”

“I’d say eight or nine.”

Detective Beckstrom had to excuse himself from the room. In the hallway, his hands went to his knees. He took several deep breaths, trying to process what he’d just heard. Eight or nine dead babies. All from the same mother. All hidden in the same garage for up to eighteen years. He’d never encountered anything like this in his entire career.

When he returned to the interrogation room five minutes later, he knew he needed the whole truth. Not the sanitized version about stillbirths and panic. Not the story designed to minimize culpability. The real story.

“Megan, when you had these babies, you said after they were born they were blue and you tried to get them to breathe. What would you do to try to get them to breathe?”

“Sometimes I was so scared, you know…” Her voice trailed off.

“Did you have like the suction bulb they use to clean out their mouths?”

“No.”

“You described earlier that you had one in the tub. That you filled the tub and—”

“Yeah.”

Detective Beckstrom leaned forward. This was the question that would change everything. “Was that baby alive when it was born?”

Long pause. Megan stared at her hands. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.

“I think it was. For a short time.”

There it was. The admission that transformed this from a tragic case of concealment into something far darker.

“Well, you say you think it was alive for a short time. What was it doing? Was it moving?”

“It started to breathe, but then it stopped.”

“For about how long?”

“Not very long.”

Detective Beckstrom pressed further. One by one, methodically, he asked about each baby. Were they alive when born? How long did they live? What did she do? And finally, after hours of careful questioning, he asked the question that needed to be asked.

“Did you kill the babies after birth?”

Megan broke down completely. The flat affect disappeared, replaced by heaving sobs. “I was so scared. I was on drugs so bad. I don’t know how—”

“How did you kill them?”

Through tears, in a voice so quiet the recording equipment barely picked it up, she described suffocating them. Wrapping them tightly in towels or shirts. Pressing on their tiny throats with her thumbs. Waiting until they stopped moving. Then carefully, meticulously packaging each small body in plastic bags and duct tape before hiding them in boxes in the garage where they would remain undiscovered for years.

“How many do you think were alive when they were born?”

“All but one, I think.”

“And you killed the others?”

“Yes.” A pause. Then again, barely audible: “Yes, I did.”

While Megan was confessing to six murders in one interrogation room, officers brought Darren West into another. If anyone should have known about seven pregnancies over the course of a decade, it was the husband and father. But Darren seemed genuinely, utterly devastated.

“I have three daughters,” he told Detective Beckstrom. “I know of one other time that she had a miscarriage. I never even knew she was pregnant with two of my daughters until she was like four or five months along. She never showed.”

The detective pressed him. How could a man live with a woman, sleep beside her every night, and not notice seven pregnancies over ten years?

“I was so messed up on freaking drugs,” Darren said, his voice breaking. “I don’t know what was going on. I swear to God, I never knew about all these pregnancies.”

And as the interrogation continued, a picture emerged of two people destroyed by methamphetamine addiction. Their entire world had revolved around getting the next fix. Megan had become an expert at hiding her pregnancies—wearing loose clothing, blaming weight gain on the drugs, isolating herself during labor. And when each baby was born and killed, she simply returned to life as normal. Cooking dinner. Raising their three living daughters. Sleeping next to her husband.

All while seven bodies decomposed in boxes just feet away in the garage.

Forensic evidence would later prove Darren was telling the truth about his ignorance. Not a single fingerprint of his was found on any of the boxes, bags, or tape. Every print belonged to Megan alone. DNA testing confirmed he was the biological father of all seven infants, but he had never known they existed.

On February 12, 2015, Megan Huntsman stood before Judge Darold McDade in a Provo courtroom and pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder. The seventh infant had been determined through autopsy to have been stillborn—the only one of the seven that Megan hadn’t killed. Her voice broke as she said “guilty” six times, once for each baby she’d suffocated or strangled.

She was sentenced to six consecutive terms of five years to life in prison—meaning she would spend a minimum of 30 years behind bars, and likely the rest of her life. Her first parole hearing isn’t scheduled until 2064. She’ll be 89 years old.

At her sentencing, Utah County Attorney Jeff Buhman read a statement: “Justice for six babies killed right after birth by their own mother. The maximum sentence that could keep her locked up for the rest of her life.”

Megan showed little emotion throughout the proceedings. The same drugs that had clouded her judgment for years had apparently numbed her to the enormity of what she’d done. She offered no explanation beyond what she’d told police: she was addicted to methamphetamine and didn’t want to care for the babies. They would interfere with her addiction. It was, in the words of Pleasant Grove Police Captain Mike Roberts, “completely selfish.”

Detective Beckstrom, the man who’d extracted her confession during that long night of interrogation, gave a statement to the media that captured the incomprehensibility of the case: “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.”

The case of Megan Huntsman raises uncomfortable questions that society still struggles to answer more than a decade later. How does a mother kill six of her own children while simultaneously raising three others with apparent normalcy? How does addiction so completely destroy a person’s moral compass that infanticide becomes a recurring solution to an unwanted pregnancy? How does a woman hide seven pregnancies from everyone around her—her husband, her children, her neighbors—for nearly two decades?

And perhaps most disturbingly: If Darren West hadn’t been released from prison early for good behavior, if he hadn’t decided to clean out that garage on that particular April day, if he hadn’t opened that one specific box wrapped in electrical tape… how much longer would those seven babies have remained hidden?

The neighbors recalled later that there had been a foul smell that occasionally drifted from the garage, especially during hot summer months. They’d assumed it was dead cats or rotting food left too long. No one thought to investigate further. That’s not what you do in quiet suburban neighborhoods where everyone knows everyone and children play in the streets.

The three living daughters Megan and Darren had raised together had helped clean that garage every year. Megan would carefully slide the boxes containing her victims to the side, sweep around them, stack other items on top. Her daughters never knew what lay hidden beneath. They were young adults by 2014, building their own lives, when they learned they’d had six siblings they never knew existed—siblings their mother had murdered.

It was a secret Megan kept with terrifying discipline for 18 years. She gave birth alone, killed alone, cleaned up alone, and returned to her daily life as if nothing had happened. She made dinner. She attended school functions. She had conversations with neighbors. All while maintaining a secret that would shock a nation when it finally came to light.

Today, Megan Huntsman remains incarcerated at the Utah State Correctional Facility, Offender Number 221913, where she will almost certainly die. Darren West has tried to rebuild his life, though the shadow of what happened in his garage will follow him forever. The three daughters they raised together must now grapple with impossible questions about their mother, their childhood, and the siblings who never got a chance to live.

And in Pleasant Grove, seven tiny graves bear silent witness to the babies who never took their first breath of free air, never felt sunshine on their faces, never experienced anything beyond a few desperate minutes of life before their own mother took it away.

True crime cases like this force us to confront the darkest capabilities of the human mind. We want to believe that mothers inherently protect their children. That the bond between parent and child is unbreakable. That certain lines exist that no one can cross, no matter how desperate or damaged they become.

Megan Huntsman proved otherwise.

Her case stands as a grim reminder that addiction, mental illness, fear, and isolation can combine to create monsters where we least expect them. Not in dark alleys or abandoned buildings, but in ordinary suburban homes with manicured lawns and friendly neighbors. In garages that look exactly like yours.

The garage at 311 West looked like any other American garage. Inside, it held 18 years of secrets that would shock a nation. And the most terrifying part?

If Darren West hadn’t opened that box, you might never have known it existed.

This case remains one of the most disturbing in American criminal history, highlighting the urgent need for better mental health resources, addiction treatment programs, and support systems for vulnerable mothers before tragedy strikes. Because somewhere, in another quiet suburban neighborhood, another garage might be holding secrets we don’t yet know about.

The question is: will we find them before it’s too late?

END