Monique Ellen Burton: Mother who left dead baby in freezer spared jail sentence

WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT

He never even had a name.

“Baby Burton” was the only way authorities could refer to Monique Ellen Burton’s sixth child, born in secret and described by the troubled woman as looking “like a doll”.

Weighing 4.29kg — at the upper end of a healthy weight for a full-term baby — he appeared “normal”, she said, after finally confessing five days later to the crime of interfering with his corpse.

But she said he made no sound and his eyes were closed.

District Court Judge Darren Renton found the 35-year-old was in a “dissociated” state after giving birth on a sofa in the loungeroom of her Geraldton home in August 2022 as her young family slept.

“It was like a dream sort of thing,” Burton said.

“I don’t know why I didn’t just stop and call out.”

Instead, she claims she slid into the shower and fell asleep after leaving the child on the cold floor of the bathroom.

By the time the father of her other five children awoke, she had wrapped the boy in a black plastic garbage bag and hid the bundle behind the sofa.

All he saw was that his partner was seriously ill and rushed her to hospital, where she remained for five days and repeatedly denied having just given birth — despite being diagnosed with post-partum pre-eclampsia.

Her de facto of 14 years suspected she had concealed a pregnancy, given she’d done so three times previously.

After their first two children, she explained away subsequent baby bumps as bloating caused by a liver condition, a lie that escalated into claims she had a terminal illness and five years left to live.

One of those secret children — a girl — was abandoned by Burton on the front porch of a vacant property.

The child was, fortunately, discovered by an off-duty nurse.

Baby Burton was also cast outside. But this time, Balaam was the culprit.

He made the grim discovery hours after the hospital dash, while searching for a mobile phone.

But rather than alerting anyone, he stuffed the garbage bag under some dog food in a chest freezer on the rear verandah, not peeking inside for fear of confirming its contents.

When he called Burton to confront her on her final day in hospital, she was mid-way through another grilling by a suspicious hospital staffer and crumbled, in tears.

Judge Renton said it was a tragic case with many layers of complexity and it was “difficult to extract any coherent” explanation for her actions.

She denied seeking to cover up the fact the child was the product of an infidelity, but the judge found her motive “was in part to avoid consequences of revelation”.

Burton had “a consistent pattern of denial and concealment responses to previous births” after the death of her third child with Balaam in 2019, a boy aged 15 months.

Mental health assessments confirmed she was suffering depression, unresolved grief, relationship difficulties and “adjustment disorder”, which involves difficulty coping with stressful events.

Judge Renton accepted her insistence Baby Burton was stillborn, saying that on the evidence before him, he could not find the uninjured child was born alive.

While her conduct was morally repugnant and the baby’s body had been subjected to a degree of indignity, it was the freezing that made it impossible to determine the cause of death, he said.

Balaam was sentenced in Geraldton Magistrates Court last year to a 12-month community-based order but Burton’s offending was too serious for such a penalty, Judge Renton said.

He imposed a 19-month term of imprisonment, suspended for 12 months, with community supervision and treatment program requirements.

One of those months was for the multiple counts of fraud Burton committed when she accepted money from an online fundraiser that her friend had set up for her, believing her terminal illness lie in good faith.

Judge Renton said Burton’s complex traumatic psychological background, guilty plea, remorse and positive steps already taken towards rehabilitation were among reasons for sparing her an immediate jail term.

She did not speak with media outside court.

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