The killing of twin babies in Illinois in 2003 is one of the most disturbing and puzzling true crime stories ever written.
The identities of the victims and the person who killed them remained a secret for more than ten years, leaving both police and the public desperate for answers.
That is, until the amazing case of Antoinette Briley, 44, came to light and shed light on a tragedy that had gone unpunished for too long.
A group of people found the bodies of two newborn boys in an alley in the 4800 block of South Latrobe Avenue in rural Stickney Township, Illinois, on June 6, 2003. An employee of waste management who was emptying trash cans made the horrible find and called the police right away. Later, an autopsy showed that the twins were born alive and died of asphyxiation. Their deaths were ruled to be murders.
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The first investigation by the Cook County Sheriff’s Office was frustrating because there were no clear leads or suspects. Detectives looked all over the area for clues and witnesses and tried everything, but the case went unsolved for more than ten years. The killing of the newborn twins looked like it would remain an unsolved mystery for a long time since there were no physical signs or possible suspects.
In 2018, the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Detectives chose to look into the case again because they wanted to find out what really happened and punish the person who did it. Using the newest advances in forensic science, they were able to find DNA evidence at the crime scene that they had not been able to find before. This important step forward helped them figure out who the girls’ mother was: Antoinette Briley.
Briley lived in Holland, Michigan, where detectives found a lost item that had her DNA on it. The examination of this proof proved that Briley was the biological mother of the twins who were killed. With this important piece of information, the investigators were able to put together the scary chain of events that had happened 20 years ago.
It had been just under two years since the Illinois Abandoned Newborn Infant Protection Act went into effect when the twin babies tragically died. Parental surrender of a healthy newborn within 30 days of birth was not a crime under this law. That law might have saved the lives of those two babies if it had been in place at the time.
The murder charges were dropped against Antoinette Briley on May 7, 2024, when she was 44 years old. She was given a 20-year prison term by the Illinois Department of Corrections.
The judge’s decision to give Briley such a long jail sentence showed how bad his actions were and how important it is to get justice, even though the crimes happened decades ago.
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