Rachel Lang
An Australian court has heard that a Queensland mother wanted to swap her unborn baby for an iPhone.
However, Logan mother Kerri-Ann Conley, 30, was found to be a fit parent in November 2019, and was awarded custody of her two children.
Two-year-old daughter Darcy-Helen and 18 month old Chloe-Ann were dead 10 days later.
Conley, a self-confessed methamphetamine addict, abandoned her two daughters in a hot car for more than nine hours, from 4am to 1pm in the hideous Queensland heat.
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She pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of her two daughters and was sentenced to nine years in jail.
The court heard of the agonising death the two children suffered, with temperatures soaring past 142/7 degrees fahrenheit (61.5 degrees celsius), as the two little girls were cooked alive.
The Queensland Supreme Court heard how paramedics pulled the two girls from the vehicle with their skin peeling off and blistered.
"Your first grossly negligent conduct was in deciding to leave your vulnerable children uncared for, unheard and unobserved in the dark," Supreme Court Justice Peter Applegarth said, as per the New Zealand Herald.
"One can only hope these little girls slowly succumbed to the growing heat of the day much earlier that morning and faded into a deep sleep from which they never returned."
He then added the brutal truth of what may have happened to her children.
"The alternative of them being awake, distressed and trapped in their seats is too much to bear thinking about it for too long," he said.
The court also heard that this was not the first time she had left her children alone in a hot car, but it had in fact occurred on several occasions.
Justice Applegarth slammed Conley’s excuse for leaving the children in her car on previous occasions, with the junkie claiming the girls were 'difficult' to settle.
He lambasted her for her actions and asked why she had them in the car in the early hours of the morning in the first place.
But, despite her incredible negligence and utter disregard for the lives of her children, Conley pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter and murder.
If she had been convicted of double-murder, Conley would have faced a mandatory non-parole period of 30 years.
Instead, with time served, Conley will be eligible for parole next year in November, five years after she killed her two daughters.
The question now remains as to why Conley had custody of the girls in the first place.
As per a report obtained by 9News, Conley told the Department of Child Services she wanted to swap her unborn baby for an iPhone 7 back in June 2018.
Later that year, she repeatedly failed to submit to several mandatory drug tests.
She went on to advise child safety authorities that she had been using methamphetamine.
The report also indicated that on 6 November 2019 (so only weeks before the two girls died), her eldest child, Darcy-Helen, was seen running around her mother’s home with a bong in her mouth.
The child was taken to hospital after the incident where doctors found she was underweight, pale and suffering from diarrhoea.
And, despite all of this, the two girls were returned to the care of their mother by the courts.