Mitchelle Blair is an American woman who gained notoriety for a highly disturbing case. In 2015, authorities discovered the bodies of two of Blair’s children, Stoni Blair and Stephen Berry, in a freezer at her home in Detroit, Michigan. The children had been missing for several years. Mitchelle Blair was arrested and charged with their murders.
During the investigation, Blair admitted to killing her two children and provided details about the abuse they had suffered. She claimed that she killed them because she believed they had sexually abused a sibling, though these allegations were not substantiated. In 2016, Blair pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and child abuse charges and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
There is no Mitchelle Blair Documentary on Netflix, but you can read the whole story on this blog post.
Mitchelle Blair, 35, was living on Detroit’s east side with her four children when she was evicted for failing to pay her rent in 2015. According to relatives, she was unable to retain a job and would constantly call them for money, but the calls stopped when they refused to assist and recommended her to seek a job and return to school.
Mitchelle Blair obviously ignored their counsel, since she was presented with an eviction notice on March 24, 2015. But she wasn’t present. That’s when a worker from the 36th District Court entered the house and began removing furnishings. What came next was not furniture. And it would reverberate across the town.
The frozen body of a teenage girl wrapped in a huge plastic bag was found inside a white deep freezer in the home’s living room. When the cops arrived, they discovered still another discovery: the body of a boy directly beneath her.
Mitchelle Blair’s location were quickly revealed by a neighbour. Police discovered her in a different neighbor’s house with her two children, ages eight and seventeen, but her other children, Stephen Gauge Berry and Stoni Ann Blair, were missing.
Mitchelle Blair was arrested for murder after a brief interrogation. When the cops carried her away, she reportedly said, “I’m sorry.”
Meanwhile, authorities sent the bodies to a mortuary for three days to defrost so that an autopsy could be completed. Stephen Berry and Stoni Blair were recognised as the victims. Their deaths were judged homicides by the medical examiner, who established that they had been in the freezer for at least a couple of years.
According to WDIV Detroit, both Stephen and Stoni died as a result of severe blunt force traumas. The medical examiner also determined that “thermal injuries” had a role in Stephen’s death. Stephen was killed in August 2012 at the age of nine, and Stoni was killed in May 2013 at the age of thirteen.
Mitchelle Blair admitted to the killings in Wayne County Circuit Court. She claimed to Judge Dana Hathaway that she murdered her “demons” after discovering they were raping her youngest son, a claim that has never been proven.
Blair stated that when she arrived home one day in August 2012, she discovered her son imitating sexual activity with dolls. Blair then asked him, “Why are you doing that?” “Has anyone ever done this to you?”
She rushed upstairs to confront him after he told her that his brother Stephen had. Blair claimed he confessed, at which point she began hitting and kicking him before laying a garbage bag over his head until he passed out.
Blair claimed she poured boiling hot water on his genitals repeatedly, causing his skin to peel off. She later forced Stephen to drink Windex before wrapping a belt over his son’s neck, lifting him up, and asking, “Do you like how this feels, choked with a belt?” Blair claimed to have lost consciousness once more.
“Blair lifted Stephen off the ground by holding onto the ends of the belt while the belt was still wrapped around Stephen’s neck,” according to a petition to end Blair’s parental rights over her surviving children, as reported by USA Today.” Blair used ‘Force Flex’ bags to put over his nose and mouth, suffocating Stephen until he lost consciousness, and Blair then ‘slapped him awake.'”
Stephen died of his injuries on August 30, 2012, after two weeks of suffering. Mitchelle Blair stored his body in her deep freezer, where vomit was discovered on and around him.
Blair stated that nine months after murdering Stephen, she discovered that Stoni was also raping her younger son. Stoni was starved and cruelly beaten at that point, and she died in May 2013. She planned to give herself in to the police, but when her youngest son told her he didn’t want her to, she made other plans.
“She was punched in the face ‘a lot,’ hit with a two-by-four, had her head covered with a garbage bag and was suffocated until she lost consciousness on at least one occasion,” according to the lawsuit.
Mitchelle Blair wrapped Stoni’s body in a plastic bag and placed her in the deep freezer on top of Stephen, continuing to live in the house as if nothing had happened.
Stephen Gauge Berry and Stoni Ann Blair had been in the deep freezer for nearly three years and had gone unnoticed. Their fathers were missing, and Blair had earlier removed children from school. She informed school officials that she would be teaching them at home. When neighbours inquired about the location of the children, she always had an excuse.
Blair told the judge she had “no remorse for her actions.” She felt no sorrow for what she had done. There was no other way out. Rape has no justification. “I’d kill them again.”
Prosecutor Carin Goldfarb reported that no evidence of rape was discovered, and Mitchelle’s oldest child, Gabi, stated that there was “no concrete evidence” that either of the children sexually molested their younger brother.
“My mom became obsessed with this crazy notion that my siblings had sexually assaulted our youngest brother, and she started basically interrogating the youngest,” Gabi Blair said on the Investigation Discovery true crime show, Evil Lives Here, in January 2023.
Gabi said that her younger brother only told Mitchelle about the alleged sexual assault after being interrogated for hours because “he didn’t know any better.”
“My mom was like a ticking time bomb,” Gabi explained. “She had her fuse perpetually lit. So even the smallest tap would set her off.”
Mitchelle Blair’s parental rights to the surviving children were terminated by Wayne County Circuit Judge Edward Joseph. Mitchelle even got into a shouting confrontation with Stoni and Gabi’s biological father during the hearing.
Mitchelle Blair pleaded guilty in June 2015 to two charges of first-degree premeditated murder and is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at the Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan.