Murder of Garnett Spears

Garnett-Paul Thompson Spears was born December 3, 2008, and died January 23, 2014, at a hospital in suburban Valhalla, New York, at age five. According to Wikipedia's account of the case, he was murdered by his mother, Lacey Spears, who injected him with high levels of sodium administered through his feeding tube from infancy through his death, leading to encephalitis.

On March 2, 2015, a jury found Lacey Spears guilty of murdering her son by poisoning him with table salt, delivered via his feeding tube. She had been charged with second-degree murder and first-degree manslaughter. On April 8, 2015, Judge Robert Neary sentenced her to 20 years to life in prison. The judge acknowledged that Spears suffers from Munchausen syndrome by proxy and, citing this, declined to impose the maximum sentence of 25 years to life. Her murder conviction was subsequently upheld by a state appellate court, and New York's highest court declined to review the conviction. As of January 2023, Spears was reported to be imprisoned at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, with parole eligibility no earlier than June 12, 2034.

Background details describe Lacey Spears as having been later diagnosed with factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA). She was born and raised in Decatur, Alabama. Described as a lonely single mother seeking attention, she frequently posted on social media about her son's health struggles and started a blog chronicling her search for a cure for his ailments. She told friends she wanted to leave Alabama and moved with Garnett to Florida to live with her maternal grandmother. Approximately 14 months before Garnett's death, she moved with him to Chestnut Ridge, New York, where they lived in a community called The Fellowship, intended for elderly and disabled residents. To explain her son's paternity, she reportedly invented a fictional character, a police officer named Blake, said to have died in a car accident. She also told Garnett's biological father, Chris Hill, that Garnett was not his son and warned him to keep his distance from her and the child.

The case has been the subject of media treatments, including the 2016 book "My Sweet Angel: The True Story of Lacey Spears, the Seemingly Perfect Mother Who Murdered Her Son in Cold Blood" by John Glatt, and episodes of true-crime television series addressing the case.

This dossier is based on a Wikipedia summary of the case; two contemporaneous news sources (CBS News and BBC News) are cited by that article as references but were not independently retrieved with article text for this dossier, so their specific factual content could not be separately verified here.