A 51-year-old woman was sentenced to 24 years in jail on Wednesday for murdering two men and keeping their bodies at her home where she had abandoned her son for months.

The Uijeongbu District Court in the city just north of Seoul found the woman, identified only by her surname Lee, guilty of murdering her husband by giving him an overdose of sleeping pills in 2004.

She was also convicted of strangling her boyfriend to death after knocking him out with sleeping pills in 2013.

Both bodies had been kept inside a rubber container at her home in Pocheon, 46 kilometers north of Seoul. The court said she abandoned her 8-year-old son in the disheveled home, with the container, for two months.

The woman previously claimed her husband had died of "natural causes." Prosecutors failed to determine the exact cause of death, as the body had been badly decomposed.

The court, however, said it is "most likely" that he died from a sleeping pill overdose.

"The defendant says she woke up one morning to see that her husband had died, but he had no wounds or a will left behind," one of the judges said.

The judges said they took into consideration that she is a first-time offender and was suffering from depression at the time of her crime.

Prosecutors had sought life imprisonment for the woman. (Yonhap)