Bodies of eight newborn babies found

Sky News

A couple have been arrested after the bodies of eight new-born babies were found at a house in northern France.

The corpses were discovered in individual plastic bags hidden around the property in the village of Villers-au-Tertre, about 35 miles from Lille.

A French judicial official said the parents of the babies have been detained. The couple are both in their 40s.

Officers began searching the house after a tip-off two days ago, French news agency AFP reported.

It said they initially found two bodies, then brought in sniffer dogs and found six more in the house and garden.

Local paper L'Observateur Douaisis said: "The parents, who are the owners of the house, have been taken into custody.

"They will appear before a magistrate on Thursday morning charged with harbouring dead bodies."

It said the charges could be strengthened to murder as the forensic investigation continues.

The prosecutor for the Nord region said a news conference is due to be held on Thursday.

In March this year, a 38-year-old mother was jailed for 15 years for killing six of her newborn babies and hiding their bodies in bin liners in the cellar of her home in Valognes, near Cherbourg.

Céline Lesage was found guilty of suffocating four babies and strangling two others after giving birth to them in secret between 2000 and 2007.

Those sniffer dogs again! As the presumed mother is in her 40's and there were eight (or more) babies my bet is they have been buried/hidden for some years. Awful sad story and how dreadful for the people working on the case.

Sky News

A Frenchwoman has been charged with murdering eight newborn babies and her husband with hiding the bodies after skeletal remains were found in a village.

Dominique and Pierre-Marie Cottrez, both about 45, were arrested over what officials say could be France's biggest infanticide case.

The woman was charged with the "deliberate homicides of minors under the age of 15", which carries a life sentence.

Her husband was indicted for "failure to report a crime and harbouring corpses".

A press conference was to be held at 12pm over a court hearing in the northern town of Douai, where the couple were charged.

Mrs Cottrez is a nursing assistant while her husband worked in the building trade and is a member of the village council in Villers-au-Tertre, a 700-strong farming community.

Police had used sniffer dogs to search two addresses after the new owners of a home found the bones of two infants while digging in their garden.

The house previously belonged to Mrs Cottrez's parents.

Search teams then headed on to the couple's home in another part of the village, where six more sets of remains were found, a councillor told reporters.

Neighbours were astonished at the couple's arrest. "They are normal people, who even have a role in the community. It's incredible," said one.

Another neighbour, a man in his 50s, added: "These are attractive, helpful, polite and courteous people, who did nothing to make you think them capable of anything abnormal."

The couple had two grown-up daughters and were grandparents, said another villager.

:: In 2009, Veronique Courjault was convicted of murdering three of her newborn children in France.

:: In Germany, a woman was convicted in 2006 of killing eight of her newborn babies and burying them in flower pots and a fish tank in a garden.

Woman charged in France over babies' bodies

July 29, 2010



Paris, France (CNN) -- French prosecutors said Thursday they charged a woman with murder after she admitted giving birth to and killing eight babies in northern France.

The woman, Dominique Cottrez, said she hid the pregnancies and deaths from her husband, who had no idea what she had done, prosecutor Eric Vaillant told reporters. Cottrez is overweight and was able to conceal the pregnancies, he said.

Cottrez told investigators the reason she killed the babies was that she did not want to have any more children and did not want to see doctors for contraceptives, Vaillant said.

Despite earlier reports that the husband had been charged, Vaillant said he was free to go but may still be investigated.

Vaillant said there are no other babies' bodies left to be found.

The case came to light when a couple gardening in their backyard in the northern town of Villers-au-Tertre found two babies' bodies in sealed plastic bags and called police.

Police spoke to Cottrez and her husband, who had previously lived in the home, and Cottrez admitted immediately that she was the mother of the two babies, Vaillant said. She then told police about six others concealed in their garage, Vaillant said.

Those six bodies were also in sealed plastic bags but were covered by various objects, he said.

Cottrez had psychological problems from her first pregnancy, said Pierre-Jean Gribouva, the lawyer for her husband, Pierre-Marie.

"My client is in a deep state of shock," Gribouva told CNN affiliate BFM. "He had no idea about this. He has totally fallen apart."

The couple are in their mid-forties. The woman is a nursing assistant while her husband is a member of the local council, a neighbor told AFP.

"These are attractive, helpful, polite and courteous people, who did nothing to make you think them capable of anything abnormal," he said.

Another resident said the couple had two grown-up daughters and were grandparents, AFP said. The pair had lived in the village for at least 15 years, neighbors said.

Former mayor Daniel Collignon said Villers-au-Tertre was a quiet, rural community. "I'm still in shock," he told AFP.

Psychotherapist Lucy Beresford told CNN that very little was known about the circumstances of infanticide because it was a taboo subject.

Research suggested that women who denied or concealed their pregnancies, for whatever reason, were a "high-risk" group, she said. But other factors could trigger infanticide as well.

"It could actually be to do with the social isolation of the mother, or it could be their psychopathology prior to pregnancy," Beresford told CNN.

"For example, do they have a history of substance abuse or other mental health concerns that have contributed to them being in this situation which they cannot accept as a reality?"

Postnatal depression could also be a possible contributory factor, she said.

"That could be because when they're depressed they're not really of sound mind. It could be that they genuinely believe they are unworthy to be a parent. Or it could just be the level of disordered thinking that comes with being depressed."

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/29/france.dead.babies/?hpt=T1#fbid=OuuD4PnTf0U