Blackstone mother Erika Murray due in court on baby murder charges

A Blackstone mother will be arraigned on murder charges Monday after the skeletal remains of three children were discovered in her home earlier this year.

In October, Erika Murray, 31, was charged with fetal death concealment, witness intimidation and permitting substantial injury to a child and held on $1 million cash bail. She pleaded not guilty to those charges. Earlier this month, she was indicted on murder charges.

Investigators say two of the three infants who were found dead apparently lived long enough for their mother to clothe and diaper them before she allegedly concealed their lifeless bodies in mounds of squalor.

Worcester County Assistant District Attorney John E. Bradley Jr. said one of the children had “a fairly full head of hair.”

Investigators also found four living children between the ages of three and 13 living in the home, which was rampant with filth, feces and decayed animal remains. The children were taken into protective custody.

Police began searching Murray’s house on Sept. 10 after a neighbor entered the house in response to a call from Murray’s son about a crying baby.

The neighbor “found the home to be in complete squalor … the smell of human and animal feces was overwhelming, and there was trash strewn throughout the home,” Bradley said in court in October.

Murray’s lawyer, defense attorney Keith Halpern, has said that his client suffers from mental illness and that she had hardly left the house in the seven or eight years before her arrest.

Her house was demolished in October by order of the Blackstone Board of Health.