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A Spring Lake woman who told deputies her 11-month-old daughter had been taken from her crib was sent to prison after admitting she hid the baby's body in the attic and invented the kidnapping, according to court records.

Johni Michelle Heuser pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Dec. 6, 2010, in the death of Harmony Jade Creech. A Harnett County judge sentenced her to 141 to 179 months in prison.

The case began on Oct. 19, 2007, when the baby's grandmother called 911 to report the child missing from a home on Ray Road. Heuser could be heard sobbing in the background of the roughly five-minute call. Authorities issued a statewide Amber Alert and brought in an FBI evidence team.

Deputies searched the house and the surrounding area but found no sign of the child, according to the Harnett County Sheriff's Office. The next day they discovered her remains in the attic, wrapped in a plastic bag and placed inside an empty diaper box.

Confronted by investigators, Heuser said she had found the girl dead in her crib weeks earlier, sometime between late August and the end of September 2007, and had concealed the death because she feared being blamed, court records show. She acknowledged knocking a screen out of the nursery window to suggest a break-in.

The child's father, Ronald Earl Creech II, a soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, had returned from a 15-month deployment in Iraq shortly before the baby was reported missing. Harmony was born while he was overseas.

Medical examiners were unable to establish a cause of death because of the condition of the remains, prosecutors said. A forensic expert who reviewed the case concluded that chronic starvation and medical neglect were likely factors. Prosecutors had sought the death penalty before Heuser entered her plea.