By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
The Merrimack woman who murdered her five-year-old boy and left him in a shallow grave plans to plead guilty this week and accept a 55-year-to-life sentence.
Danielle Dauphinais’s attorney filed an intent to change her not guilty plea to guilty in Hillsborough Superior Court South in Nashua as part of a negotiated plea agreement.
According to the document, Dauphinais will plead guilty on Thursday to one count of Second-Degree Murder for knowingly killing her son, and two counts of witness tampering. Dauphinais, 38, will serve three and a half to seven years in prison on each witness tampering count consecutively after she’s served time for the murder conviction.
She’s effectively accepting a maximum enhanced penalty in exchange for avoiding a life sentence without any hope of parole.
Prosecutors filed notice in August that the state planned to seek enhanced penalties at the trial scheduled for October. Dauphinais was facing life in prison without parole if convicted of First Degree Murder, and prosecutors would have sought at least 35 to life if she were convicted on a lesser Second Degree Murder count.
Her boyfriend, Joseph Stapf, 33, was set to testify against her at the upcoming trial. Stapf pleaded guilty in 2022 to manslaughter and other charges for his role in Elijah’s death. He is serving a 22- to 45-year prison sentence.
As part of her agreement, Dauphinais will not to sell her story or profit in any way from the murder of her son.
Dauphinais allegedly killed Elijah in a rage on Sept. 21, 2021 after weeks of starvation and beatings. Stapf reportedly found the boy naked in the bathtub surrounded by broken tiles smeared in blood. Stapf still did not get the boy medical help. Instead, he bandaged the wound on his head and put him back in his room, according to court records.
After the boy was dead, Dauphinais had Stapf take Elijah’s lifeless body to a forest in Abington, Massachusetts where he was buried, according to court records. Stapf emerges as a coward whose indifference to the boy enabled Dauphinais’s abuse in the court records.
Dauphinais starved her son, made him stand for hours without clothing and blankets in his room in their basement apartment, and she beat him, cut him and burned him, according to court records. All the while, Stapf sided with Dauphinais. When she sent Stapf a text complaining that Elijah wanted food, Stapf played into her abusive parenting.
“Yes, he is a POS big time. Wow, I cannot stand that boy,” Stapf replied.
But Elijah’s worsening condition, and the extreme treatment, started to worry Stapf, according to court records. Stapf decided he wanted Dauphinais to feed the boy and clothe him. The concern, according to the text messages, was getting Elijah healthy enough that the couple could safely leave him with another relative.
“Maybe let him sleep and feed him,” Stapf wrote at one point. “No more you know what to him, he needs to look good so we can go out,” Stapf wrote.
Elijah’s mother was not willing to show any mercy or kindness to her son.
“This (expletive) kid deserves nothing,” she wrote back.
Elijah weighed 19 pounds when he died. The average 5-year-old boy weighs 40 pounds. The boy also had a rotting hole in his back, a result of the torture, according to court records.
The cause of Elijah’s death was violence and neglect, including facial and scalp injuries, acute fentanyl intoxication, malnourishment and pressure ulcers, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Massachusetts.
When authorities started asking questions about Elijah’s weeks later, Dauphinais and Stapf fled the state. They were arrested Oct. 17, 2021, by officers of the New York City Transit Authority in the Bronx, New York.
