Mother Killed Newborns And Placed Bodies In Freezer

June 9, 2009 by tanya
Filed under: News

A mother in France has gone on trial accused of killing two newborn babies and hiding their bodies in a freezer.

Veronique Courjault has been accussed of keeping her pregnancies secret from her husband, and will be sentenced to life imprisonment if found guilty of murder.

Judges will have to decide whether Courjault was aware of what she was doing or if she was in denial about becoming a mother.

Courjault, who has two sons aged nine and eleven, was living with her husband in Seoul, South Korea in 2006. Her husband, Jean-Louis, made the grizzling discovery while his wife was in France with her children.

After buying some fish, Jean-Louis, who is an engineer, decided to put it in the freezer downstairs. He called the police, and then flew to France to inform his wife. At a press conference, they told reporters that they had no idea how the babies had turned up in their freezer.

DNA tests later concluded that they were the parents of the babies, and they were both arrested. His wife confessed that she had given birth to the children alone in 2002 and 2003 in her bathroom. She later strangled the babies and froze their bodies, she said that she kept the pregnancies a secret from her husband, who was often away for long periods of time.

Courjault also confessed that she had killed a baby in 1999 while in France, and had disposed of the body in the family fireplace.

She said “For me, it was never children, it was a part of me, a prolongation of myself that I killed,”

She has spent two and a half years in prison, and her husband has been cleared of any involvement in the murders. He said: “Society has to admit that not all pregnancies are happy. My wife certainly has a problem of a psychological order.”