The secret this mother hid shocked even the most hardened police investigators.

WARNING: This post contains images and details of alleged child abuse and may be distressing for some readers.

The mother posted images on Facebook of her seemingly perfect family life.

Her two children – a 13-year-old girl and a 10-year old boy.  Posing in neat school clothes. Happy Halloween images. Home cooked meals. Apple picking with their father.

A happy family of four.

Little did anyone know – even her own parents who lived in the same town – her home hid a secret beyond what anyone could imagine.

And it wasn’t until police were called to investigate reports of crying that her terrible secret was revealed.

Earlier this week Erika Murray, a 31-year old mother from Blackstone, Connecticut in the US pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder one count of fetal death concealment relating to the remains of three babies and not guilty to two counts of assault and battery with serious bodily injury to two young children found severely neglected and abused and two more counts of reckless endangerment for keeping her two oldest children living in “squalid conditions.”

These charges related to what police found when they entered her home last September.

Police had been called by a neighbour who had entered the house after the 10-year old boy asked her for help with a “crying baby”.

She told police she was stunned at what she saw.

Two small children aged three and five months that no one knew existed hidden upstairs.

The 3-year-old “could not walk or talk” and was essentially deaf.

She was found rocking back and forth sitting in the middle of a bed that sagged because it was so saturated with feces.

The neighbour told The Boston Globe “Everything had maggots on it. Everything had feces on it, so I took my shirt off,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified.

Police found the 3-year-old “covered in feces” in a room “completely filled with trash that was piled about two feet high.”

“The peadiatricians had to literally clean the maggots out of her ears so that she was able to hear correctly,” Assistant District Attorney John E. Bradley Jr. told the court.

The neighbour testified to a grand jury that the three-year old girl appeared to have been “dipped in feces”.

A 5-month-old in a room next door that had “stacks of soiled diapers that were piled about a foot or so high,” the prosecutor said.

The Boston Globe reported that the baby showed signs of an infant who is not used to seeing sunlight.

The next day when police returned – unbelievably  – what they found was worse.

The body of an infant concealed in a closet “wrapped in a pair of sweat pants.”

The baby still had the umbilical cord and the placenta attached to it, and according to police had what appeared to be a full head of hair.

And in other closets two more dead babies.

Five children, five births, all concealed.

And three of these babies, dead.

Murray’s live-in boyfriend Raymond Rivera, 38, claims to have not know the two living children were his, nor of the three dead babies, even though he slept 2/1/2 metres away from their concealed bodies.

Murray told police that for financial reasons, her boyfriend did not want any more children after the first two.

She says the couple continued to have unprotected sex, and that she fell pregnant five times in seven years.

The prosecutor told the court that the 31-year old mother delivered the three babies alone in the bathroom, then took them upstairs “in an effort to hide the babies from her boyfriend,” the Boston Globe reports.

The Boston Globe reports that Murray had allegedly told Rivera and her two older children and that the two younger children belonged to another woman and that she was babysitting them.

She had even gone to the extreme lengths of creating a fake Facebook profile for this pretend woman and donning sunglasses and a disguise for the woman’s profile pic.

Its been reported that Murray’s own parents who lived just streets away did not know of these two hidden living children.

The prosecutor told the court on Monday that based on testimony from witnesses and alleged admissions by Murray, that the two of the babies were likely alive anywhere from a week to a month.

Mass Live reports that the two clothed babies found in the home were full-term.l

The case has been dubbed a house of horrors by the US media, with the squalid conditions the children lived in shocking even to the most hardened investigators.

The remains of several dead animals lay inside the bedrooms, mice, feces and soiled nappies littered the hallways.

The house was so bad that police officers in hazmat suits had to retrieve the bodies of the three dead babies.

Murray’s live in boyfriend and the father of all the children Raymond Riveria claimed that he never went to the upstairs area of the home and did not know of its condition.

He has since been arrested and charged with two counts of assault and battery on a child causing substantial bodily injury, two counts of reckless endangerment of a child, two counts of cruelty to animals and one count of cultivating marijuana.

Erika Murray who is being held on $1 million bail has not been charged with murder for the baby found with the umbilical cord still attached. Her lawyer said “There is not a single case in Massachusetts that supports a conviction of murder on evidence so speculative and so weak,” he said. “The appropriate thing would have been to wait for the medical examiner’s report to be completed.”

The house these seven children lived in has now been levelled. A Christmas tree placed on the site where it used to be.

She will next appear in court in early February.