On the morning of April 22, 2015, one sorority sister after another opened the bathroom door and recoiled in disgust.
The toilet at Muskingum University’s Delta Gamma Theta house was splattered with blood.
Suspecting that it was a feminine hygiene issue, the sorority’s house manager texted everyone living in the building that whoever was responsible needed to come clean up her mess.
“It looks like a murder scene,” the manager wrote.
She had no idea how right she was.
That night, four Deltas went out for ice cream in the small college town of New Concord, Ohio. Instead of school, however, all they could talk about was Emile Weaver. The 20-year-old had put on weight recently and begun to act strangely, giving rise to rumors among her sorority sisters that Weaver was secretly pregnant.
Now there was the blood in the bathroom.
One of the Deltas had a horrible hunch.
She and a sorority sister went outside to the house’s garbage bin. On the ground, they found a trash bag.
They tore a hole.
“We kept shaking the bag,” Madison Bates testified in court, according to the Zanesville Times Recorder. “And I saw a baby’s foot.”
That shocking discovery would uncover an even more startling crime.
Weaver was arrested a few days later. According to prosecutors, she had hidden her pregnancy for nine months, all the while desperately trying to kill the baby she didn’t want. She drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and took scores of labor-inducing supplements.
“She wanted Addison dead,” Muskingum County Assistant Prosecutor Ron Welch said in court, according to the Columbus Dispatch. “Whether it was during her pregnancy or after birth, it didn’t matter. She didn’t want the baby.”
When the baby somehow survived, Weaver took a more direct approach, cutting the umbilical cord herself before putting the newborn in a plastic bag, where the child suffocated to death, prosecutors said.
“No more baby,” she texted the man she thought was the father. “Taken care of.”
In May, an Ohio jury found Weaver guilty of aggravated murder, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence, according to the Associated Press.
On Monday, she was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
A jury found her guilty of aggravated murder, abuse of a corpse and two counts of tampering with evidence.
During sentencing, Weaver’s own former sorority sisters took the stand to describe how they had been traumatized by that terrible day.
Saer, the sorority sister who had heard the baby’s only cries, said she had been “distraught” afterward.
“She wishes she’d broken down the door,” Muskingum County Common Pleas Judge Mark Fleegle said of Saer.
Weaver’s defense attorney argued his young client deserved the chance for parole after 20 years in prison, saying she was sorry for what she did even if she didn’t act like it.
