Brookey Lee West and her mother had a love/hate relationship that went beyond the typical mother-daughter conflict. When Brookey was seven, her alcoholic mother Christine went to prison for shooting an ex-lover, leaving Brookey in the care of her father who was not exactly a model parent himself.

The gun toting-white supremacist and Satan worshipper soon dumped Brookey in an orphanage and she did not see either of her parents for six years.

Over the next three decades, Brookey achieved professional success as a technical writer but her personal life was a different story. Her relationships tended to end with someone mysteriously dead and that someone definitely was not Brookey.

In 2001, police uncovered another mysterious death in her life; Christine’s badly decomposed body was discovered in a rubbish bin locked inside a Las Vegas storage unit, surrounded by books about witchcraft and Satanism. It was no mystery who put her there. Brookey not only rented the unit, her fingerprints were on the tape sealing the rubbish bin shut.

At her trial, Brookey admitted putting her mother in storage but insisted she did not kill her. However, there was one nagging detail the jury could not get past. Brookey had tied a plastic bag around her mother’s nose and mouth.

A forensic expert testified that it was highly possible that Christine had been alive when placed in the bin and the bag had suffocated her to death.

It took the jury just two hours to find Brookey guilty. She is currently serving a life sentence in a southern Nevada women’s prison, where she leads a Bible study group and teaches art to the other inmates.