HOUSTON — Kimberly Dawn Trenor will spend the rest of her life in prison for killing her little girl, the child the world first came to know as “Baby Grace.”
Jurors convicted Trenor of capital murder Monday and she was given an automatic life sentence without parole.
Trenor’s husband, Royce Zeigler, will soon stand trial for the same crime. His attorneys plan to use Trenor’s own words as part of his defense.
It’s a written confession by Trenor — one of several with conflicting accounts of the torture session that killed 2-year-old Riley Ann Sawyers.
In the version obtained by 11 News, Trenor called her daughter a “spoiled brat” who “needs discipline.” Trenor said she was not “going to be embarrassed by Riley again.”
Trenor said she “just snapped.”
“I just kept hitting her with the belt again and again. I remember her trying to get away and me knocking her back down on the couch and sometimes she hit the floor instead,” Trenor wrote.
“It is a short-term event that occurs that causes the death of Riley, and Royce has absolutely no part of it,” said Dee McWilliams, Zeigler’s attorney.
The medical examiner disagrees.
He testified that Riley’s three skull fractures could not have come from her falling and hitting her head, as McWilliams suggests. There had to be massive, repeated hits, like an adult throwing her to the floor, according to the ME’s testimony.
“She was black and blue from head to toe barely able to squeeze my fingers. All I could do was hold her and feel her go cold,” Trenor told investigators in the confession.
She said it was her idea to dispose of Riley’s battered body.
“She was gone but no one had to know what really happened right?” she wrote.
Trenor writes she that bought the blue box alone. She said Ziegler was sleeping when she slipped out of bed and drove alone to Galveston to dump the body in the bay.
She wrote that Royce never knew what happened.
“Riley in a box,” she wrote.” What a terrible dream.”
Photo by: Jennifer Reynolds
Kimberly Dawn Trenor and Riley Ann Sawyers
“We thought her first statement was full of lies when she got with Sgt. Barry here and was giving that statement,” said Galveston County Prosecutor Kurt Sistrunk. “And we think every statement she gave after that was full of lies too.”
In Trenor’s videotaped confession, she said Zeigler did help kill Riley and dispose of her body.
Royce Zeigler also wrote his own confession.
He remains behind bars awaiting a date for his capital murder trial.
Gone But Not Forgotten 
What kind of human could do this to a another human being, much less a child. god forgive thier sins. I think hell will be to good for people like this. there has to be a worst place for their souls. I know that little girl.