Shaylynn Curtis (Christian County Jail)

A 30-year-old woman in Kentucky will spend more than two decades behind bars after pleading to killing her 5-month-old son — who died in 2021 of complications due to ingesting methamphetamine — then hiding his body in the attic for at least a day. Circuit Court Judge Jamus Redd on Monday ordered Shaylynn Curtis to serve a sentence of 23 years in a state correctional facility.

Curtis entered an Alford plea to one count of murder and one count of abuse of a corpse in connection to the infant’s death, authorities confirmed to Law&Crime. Judge Redd sentenced Curtis to 20 years on the murder charge and three years on the abuse of corpse charge, to be served consecutively.

An Alford plea is functionally equivalent to a guilty plea in that it results in a conviction, but it allows a defendant to maintain their claim of innocence while conceding that the state has sufficient evidence to convict them at trial.

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Given the opportunity to speak on her own behalf, Curtis told the court, “I love my son,” according to a report from Princeton, Kentucky news radio station WPKY.

Authorities said that Curtis’ son died on the evening of Oct. 25, 2021.

According to the Kentucky State Police (KSP) Post 1, Curtis was arrested the day after her son died following an incident in which she brought her already-deceased infant to a friend’s house for an unknown reason. After that, she returned to her own residence, placed the baby in swaddling clothes and then put him in the attic of her home on East Adams Mill Road in Trigg County.