Catherine Goins, a Tennessee woman who murdered a mom so she could steal her newborn daughter, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Friday, May 13.
The 39-year-old pleaded guilty to malice murder, felony murder, armed robbery, aggravated assault and kidnapping, the Times Free Press reported.
On September 19, 2014, Goins lured Natalia Roberts and her two children to the Georgia home of her former boyfriend, Tony Richards, by placing a Craigslist ad selling baby clothes. As Goins led Roberts down a narrow set of steps to where the alleged items were kept, she shot the 30-year-old in the head with a .38-caliber handgun.
A panicked Goin attempted to clean up the blood at the crime scene before calling Richards to tell him that she had shot someone in his house. “Tony instructed her to hang up and call 911,” Catoosa County Sheriff Gary Sisk told the Times Free Press. Instead, Goins snatched Roberts’ daughters — ages 3 and 3 weeks — and drove them around the neighborhood in the victim’s Ford Escape. Eventually, Richards convinced Goins to return to his home, and she was arrested four days later.
Goins told police that Roberts was burglarizing the house and that she shot her in self-defense, but Sisk said she later changed her story. “At first, she was denying, sure,” he told the Times Free Press. “But within several days of the incident, she did give us a confession.”
Sisk added that Goins wore a prosthetic baby bump. “It’s my understanding,” Sisk told the paper, “if I remember it correctly, she was trying to stay with a particular boyfriend. She felt that if she was pregnant and had his child, that would get him to stay with her.”
