A teenage girl said that she buried her stillborn baby. Now she is on trial for murder.

For months, no one knew that Brooke Skylar Richardson, 18, was pregnant. The bump barely showed that college-bound high school student wore a cheerleading uniform on the sidelines, a bikini at spring break or even when she wore a glittering red dress at the ball, less than two days before d & # 39; 39, give birth on May 7th. 2017

Even at the time, only Richardson and his gynecologist were aware, prosecutors said Tuesday at the Warren County court in Ohio.

It was the middle of the night when the baby arrived, prosecutors said. Richardson's parents were sleeping downstairs. his brother was asleep in the hallway. The teenager went to the bathroom and came out with a lifeless baby.

Alone, she buried the infant in the yard and went back inside without telling anyone, prosecutors said. She completed high school a few weeks later and spent the next two months preparing for university at the University of Cincinnati. Then, one afternoon in July 2017, the police called. Richardson's gynecologist reported the baby's death to the Warren County Coroner, leaving the cause of death blank.

The police wanted to know: how did the child die?

This is the same question that will be left to a jury to decide Richardson's trial for aggravated murder following the death of his baby beginning this week. From the beginning, Richardson insisted that the baby was stillborn. Although a coroner was unable to determine the cause of death, the prosecutors insisted that it was a homicide and that Richardson, aged 20, buried the evidence to allow him to continue to live as usual.

The case exploded, becoming a tale of tabloids about an American cheerleader accused of secretly killing her child because she and her family were "pretty obsessed" with outward appearances, such as Warren County Attorney David Fornshell said in 2017. He claimed that Richardson had been burned the corpse of the baby too – sinister details that later turned out to be incorrect, said the lawyer. from Richardson, but they only fed nonstop coverage. Photographers were camping in front of the family's home in the small town of Carlisle, waiting to share the latest snapshots of the family's life. Anti-abortion activists have criticized Richardson's hearings, seeking justice for Baby Jane Doe.

But Richardson did not kill the baby, his lawyer, Charles Rittgers, insisted on Tuesday with the prospective jurors during the selection of the jury. Instead, he said, "This case involved a massive trial of judgment."

Warren County Deputy Attorney Julie Kraft said Tuesday that it all began in August 2016, when Richardson broke a relationship with a guy she had been dating for about a month.

She would spend a good part of her last year of high school to be pregnant, but it was hard for friends and family to know Richardson had suffered from anorexia and bulimia for years, did she? he told friends and family at Cosmopolitan last year. They could say in the spring of 2017 that she had gained weight – but the last thing they wanted to do was ask her why. Richardson had a new boyfriend whom she met at school. She was on the board of honor and had been accepted to the university. Maybe she felt more comfortable in her body, they thought.

"I was happy because I thought," Oh, she met that nice boy. She does not care anymore about her appearance, no matter how thick she gets, "Richardson's aunt told Cosmopolitan. "I mean, eating disorders have always been horrible. So we were all like, "Oh, yay! She is gaining weight. "

As Richardson's relationship with his new boyfriend progressed, his mother, Kim, thought it might be time for Richardson to speak to a gynecologist about birth control, Cosmo said.

Richardson went to his first appointment with an OB / GYN on April 26, 2017, said Kraft. But the doctor told Richardson that she could not have birth control: she was already 32 weeks pregnant.

"Upon learning that she was pregnant, Brooke broke down in tears and told her doctor that she could not have this child and that she could not talk to anyone about her pregnancy," she said. said Kraft, according to the video footage of the Fox 19 trial. "And Brooke did not tell anyone. She did not tell her parents, her friends, and the baby's father.

The doctor told her that she could expect to give birth by 10 weeks, according to Rittgers. But the doctor was cheated on one point, said Rittgers: It turned out that Richardson was pregnant for 37 to 39 weeks. The fetus was smaller than it should have been, he said.

Instead of giving birth 10 weeks later, she gave birth within 11 days.

The baby was lifeless and pale, Rittgers said. The umbilical cord was not attached to the placenta. The newborn was not breathing, he said. Kim told the Cincinnati investigator that her daughter had said that she had rocked the baby for hours, waiting for him to open his eyes, cry or move, but that did not happen. has never been the case.

Finally, said Kim, Richardson grabbed a gardening shovel in the garage and pulled back to the end of the family's vast back yard. She dug a hole between two pines.

"It's so hard to believe that I have a grandson that I've never had," Kim told Enquirer.

When Richardson returned to the gynecologist for birth control later that summer, she told the doctor what had happened – and shortly thereafter the police had questions.

At first, Rittgers said, the police did not dispute Richardson's explanation that the baby was stillborn. But then came a doctor hired by the prosecution. She examined the skeleton – and said the bones seemed "charred".

That's when Fornshell told a newsroom in August 2017 that authorities believed Richardson had burned the baby. When asked about the motive, he mentioned the family's alleged concern about appearances, which the family categorically denied.

"She's a pretty young high school graduate, a cheerleader her lawyer called a" good girl, "Fornshell said. "And I think Skylar wanted to perpetuate that kind of perception and that his mother wanted to perpetuate it."

Fornshell said he could not tell how the baby was burned or how he was killed.

Rittgers said Tuesday that it was because the baby had not been killed. What the prosecution did not reveal to the jury on Tuesday, he said, was that the doctor who thought the remains were burned subsequently retracted this testimony and said that she had committed a mistake. (Fornshell has already challenged how Rittgers qualified the opinions of the experts.)

At that time, Richardson had already been charged – in part because of erroneous details about charred bones, Rittgers said. These details also led the detectives to attempt to confess Richardson for hours of interrogation. Holding her hands at the table in an interrogation room, "as if they were her friends," said Rittgers. The police told him that it would be better if she said that she was trying to cremate the body. Eventually, Rittgers said that after having denied having burned the baby 17 times and that after describing the baby as having died at birth 29 times, she seemed to have given in, claiming that she had tried to incinerate it. Rittgers said that they had "broken it."

"What happens when the doctor who made this horrible mistake changed his mind and told everyone that I was wrong, that the bones were not burned? "Said Rittgers. "What happened?" The police did not press a reset button Prosecutors did not press a reset button … They ignore any truth that does not fit into their story And that's why we're here today.

Kraft acknowledged that the prosecution did not have "medical and scientific" evidence of the cause of the baby's death, but added that prosecutors also collected a wealth of e-mail messages taken by investigators from several devices. the house, which would help prove the case. She said that these details would come later.

In addition to the aggravated murder, Richardson is also charged with manslaughter, endangering a child, falsifying evidence and blatant abuse of a corpse. The trial is expected to last two weeks.

If found guilty, Richardson could face life imprisonment.