PLEASANT GROVE, Utah — For Megan Huntsman, life was a miserable struggle. Her marriage decayed into substance abuse and violence, she told people close to her. Her ailing father’s suicide pitched her into despair and heavy drinking. Illness ravaged her family. She lost her job at a supermarket bakery and spent recent days alone at her boyfriend’s trailer home.

But all the while, the police say, Ms. Huntsman, 39, concealed a secret grimmer and darker than any hardship she had suffered: In the garage of her home, tucked away among old shoes and an artificial Christmas tree, were the bodies of seven infants. One was stillborn, she told the police, but she admitted to strangling or suffocating the other six just minutes after they were born from 1996 to 2006.

Like the cases of Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, the tale of a profoundly troubled mother and her dead children here in central Utah has again cast a national glare on the most intimate and inexplicable kind of crime. It has left this stunned community agonizing over how a slight, shy woman had concealed so many pregnancies and births, and whether officials had missed a chance to intervene before the grim mausoleum was discovered on April 12 as others in the family cleaned out the garage.

Federal drug enforcement officers did not find the bodies when they visited the home in 2005 to investigate Ms. Huntsman’s husband, Darren Brad West, on charges of mail-ordering methamphetamine ingredients. Court records show that Ms. Huntsman allowed investigators to “look through the residence” and that they had found drug evidence in the garbage. Pleasant Grove police officials said federal agents had not gotten a search warrant for the home.