Logan Country Jail

The young boys were smothered to death over a 13-month period.

An Ohio mother has been sentenced to life in prison for murdering her young sons.

Brittany Pilkington, 27, pleaded guilty to killing four-year-old Gavin, three-month-old Niall and three-month-old Noah between July 2014 and August 2015.

During police interviews, she said she feared the brothers would grow up to abuse women, as she had been.

She also said she was depressed, and admitted she was jealous of the attention her husband paid to them, but not her or their now-eight-year-old daughter Hailey.

47-year-old Joseph Pilkington, also pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of sexual imposition, for having sex with Brittany when she was underage.

He had been her mother's long-time live-in boyfriend, and had raised Brittany as her step-father. He then impregnated her in 2009, when she was 17. They eventually married.

Each time Brittany killed a child, she waited for her husband to come home from work to find him.

Every time she smothered them, she covered their face with a blanket so she wouldn't have to look at them, she confessed.

Niall was the first to die, in July 2014. His death was first ruled unexplained.

The criminal investigation didn't begin until Gavin died in April 2015. Because of that investigation, Hailey and Noah were removed from her care.

But when they were returned in August 2015, she killed Noah less than a week later.

Her guilty plea to two counts of murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter took the death penalty off the table, the Columbia Dispatch reported.

Her defense team had argued that she had suffered repeated sexual abuse and beatings as a child, and had also suffered lead poisoning, which may have left her brain damaged.

"Brittany's brain is broken," attorney Kort W. Gatterdam said before sentencing on Tuesday. "And no one ever helped her."

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said in a statement: "A guilty plea cannot undo the heartless acts this woman committed against defenseless children — she does not deserve to be called mom. But locking her up will at least guarantee she won't be able to repeat this evil."

Pilkington will not be eligible for parole for 37 years.