By
The Associated Press
PITTSBURGH - A woman was sentenced to die yesterday for starving her 7-year-old daughter to death.
Michelle Sue Tharp, 31, was convicted of murder in the death of Tausha Lee Lanham, who weighed less than 12 pounds when she died in 1998.
The girl's body was dumped along a West Virginia road. Tharp and her boyfriend reported that the child had disappeared from a shopping mall.
Tharp becomes the fourth woman on Pennsylvania's death row.
The boyfriend, Douglas Bittinger, 28, testified that Tharp typically fed her three other children more than Tausha and that the girl foraged for food in garbage cans and drank from the toilet.
Bittinger is awaiting trial on homicide charges.
