Stephany Bilecki (Fairbanks Police Department).
An Alaska mom will spend the next several decades behind bars for the suffocation murder of her infant daughters two years apart.
In July, Stephany Elizabeth Bilecki, 30, formerly known as Stephany LaFountain, pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in the second degree over the deaths of her 4-month-old and 13-month-old baby girls.
On Monday afternoon, in a Fairbanks courtroom, Bilecki was sentenced to 130 years in prison — with 85 years suspended. In total, she will serve 45 years in state prison.
In exchange for her guilty plea, prosecutors dropped two additional charges of second-degree murder dropped — as well as two charges of murder in the first degree.
“The mandatory minimum for both of those is, in fact, 20 years because this was her child in each case,” Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Crail said during the sentencing hearing, according to a courtroom report by Fairbanks-based NBC affiliate KTVF.
In September 2015, the since-condemned woman called her boyfriend and mother to break the grim news: her 4-month-old girl, Chyanne, was dead, prosecutors explained in a press release. Ten minutes later, and just before her mother arrived, the murderess dialed 911.
Otherwise a healthy little girl, the cause of death was presumed to be sudden infant death syndrome. An investigation would later determine she died from injuries consistent with strangulation.
Then, two years passed, and the killer struck again. And the sequence of events would prove to be eerily similar.
In November 2017, while her husband was deployed, she attempted to call him but settled for calling her in-laws. This time, Bilecki reported that her 13-month-old girl, Jasmine, was not breathing. Once again, just before the girl’s grandparents arrived, the mother called 911.
But this time, the investigation would be markedly more searching — and come up with tell-tale evidence of the crime.
In the hours before making the phone calls, Bilecki searched the internet on her cellular phone using phrases like: “ways to suffocate,” “ways to kill a human with no proof,” “drugs that can kill ppl with no trade,” “can drowning show in an o autopsy report,” “16 steps to kill someone and not get caught” and others along those lines, prosecutors said.
Days later, the second child died.
An autopsy would show that Jasmine’s cause of death was a lack of oxygen.
Suspicions significantly aroused, investigators soon began to understand that Bilecki was likely responsible for each of the deaths — and the original investigation was reopened.
In August 2018, she was indicted by a grand jury in Fairbanks.
“Just think about a mother killing both her children over two years, completely isolated events, and what that means, and what happens sometimes in our community, and sometimes just the evil that exists, that’s out there,” then-Fairbanks Police Department Chief Eric Jewkes said at the time.
Years of legal wrangling ensued.
Superior Court Judge Patricia Haines accepted the guilty plea over the summer, KTVF reported, describing the defendant as “barely audible” when she accepted legal culpability.
The state requested each murder be punished with 65 years — with 40 years suspended for one count and 45 years suspended for the second count. The judge obliged that request. If and when Bilecki is released, she will be subject to a maximum of 10 years probation. She will not be allowed to have unsupervised contact with minors under 16 in non-public locations.
“The conduct forming the basis of defendant Bilecki’s convictions shocks the conscience,” Fairbanks District Attorney Joe Dallaire said in a statement. “Although we cannot pretend that anything will ever make up for the losses suffered by the fathers of these babies or their other family members, I do hope the convictions and the sentences imposed affords some measure of justice to the families of Jasmine and Chyanne and to the Fairbanks community at large.”
