Ohio Woman Sentenced to 37 Years in Prison After Pleading Guilty to Suffocating and Killing Three Young Sons

An Ohio woman has been sentenced to 37 years in prison after pleading guilty on Tuesday to involuntary manslaughter and murder for suffocating her three young sons to death because she was jealous of the attention that her husband was giving them.

Brittany Pilkington, 27, killed her three-month-old son Noah in August 2015 in her apartment in Bellefontaine using a blanket to smother him, the Associated Press reported.

The woman had previously suffocated her other sons, four-year-old son Gavin and infant Niall, in April 2015 and July 2014 respectively using the same method.

Pilkington said that her husband had not been paying her or her daughter any attention, focusing instead on the the sons, according to Logan County prosecutors.

Pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter and murder means that Pilkington will not face the death penalty, which is legal in the state of Ohio. The woman pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder charges.

Logan County Prosecutor Eric Stewart said that the sentence would bring "justice and closure to this tragic case and protect the community from the defendant."

He added that the death penalty was not appropriate in this case, as noted by a state expert, because recent medical tests revealed that Pilkington has brain damage.

This damage is partly a result of her suffering lead poisoning as a baby, but also because she was regularly abused, physically and sexually, later on in life, with no protection from parents or the authorities, according to one of her attorneys Kort Gatterdam.

In a statement read out by another of her attorneys Tina McFall, Pilkington said that she "loves and misses all of her children and grieves for them every day."

The perpetrator of the abuse that the woman suffered when she was younger came at the hands of her future husband, Joseph Pilkington—who was in a relationship with the defendant's mother at the time and had been living in their house as a kind of stepfather.

Joseph Pilkington—who is twenty years older than Brittany—previously pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of sexual imposition for having sex with her when she was underage, before they were married, and has already served his sentence. The man impregnated her in 2009 when she was 17.

"She had a monster in her life, from the age of 9," Gatterdam told WSYX. "Being shown pornography, being raped, being raped repeatedly. Sadly, she's safer living a better life in jail than on the outside," he said, describing his client as "irreparably damaged."

Joseph Pilkington was a not a suspect in the death of the three boys.