Fetus killer sentenced to 100 years in prison

A Boulder County woman was sentenced to 100 years in prison Friday for cutting an unborn baby out of another woman and attempting to claim the child as her own.

Prosecutors had asked for 118 years, but also told the judge that whatever time Dynel Lane spends in prison pales in comparison to the pain and suffering she caused.

Lane’s crime began with an ad she posted on Craigslist offering to sell baby clothes.

Michelle Wilkins responded to the ad, went to Lane’s home, and was attacked in the basement.

Lane then cut Wilkins’s unborn baby from her stomach and left her on the floor, then went to the hospital and claimed she had a miscarriage.

Her story unraveled when doctors examined her and realized she did not just give birth.

The baby did not survive.

13 months after Wilkins was nearly killed, and two months after Lane was convicted by a jury, the judge sentenced her to prison.

In court this week, Wilkins said she hopes lane can change.

“It is clear that you need healing, and it is my sincere belief that you get it,” she said.

But prosecutors told the judge Lane has yet to show any remorse.

Anna May Langdon was Lane’s neighbor when she lived in Pueblo.

“She snapped. She had to have snapped,” Langdon told KRDO last year, “Something went wrong there. That don’t seem like the Dynel I knew.”

Michael Lane of Pueblo is Lane’s father-in-law.

Lane married his son in 2010, but the couple split up about a year later.

“She was just real quiet,” Lane recalled, “Never said much. But there was never any sign that she was capable of something like this.”

A tragedy in Pueblo, however, could have played a role.

In 2002, Lane’s nearly two-year-old son drowned.

The sheriff’s office ruled it was an accident.

The unborn child in the 2015 case, Aurora, was a month from being born when she was killed by Lane.

Because she was still in her mother’s womb at the time, Lane was not charged with murder, despite objections from many in the community and also Lane’s father-in-law.

“I think we have to apply the murder charge here,” he said in the days that followed the crime.

Lane’s attorney Friday said they plan to appeal.

Shortly after Aurora’s death, state lawmakers tried to pass a bill making killing a fetus a murder, but it didn’t pass largedly because opponents worried it could be applied to abortions in Colorado.