The actions of a French woman, jailed for killing her newborn babies, were 'unfathomable mysteries', writes LARA MARLOWE, in Paris
THE MACABRE details of three murdered newborns whose bodies were either burned or stored in the family home freezer contrasted starkly with the sheer ordinariness of Véronique Courjault (41), the shy, dowdy housewife who committed these horrors.
On Thursday, Courjault was sentenced to eight years in prison for killing three baby boys she delivered alone and in secret in 1999, 2002 and 2003. Because she has served nearly three years in pre-trial detention, Courjault will be eligible for parole in a year. Outside the courthouse in Tours, protesters greeted the sentence with shouts of “Murderer!”
The first baby was born in France, in a small town in the Charente department. Courjault’s husband Jean-Louis, an engineer who specialises in diesel engines, worked in Blois during the week, returning home at weekends. Courjault hid the dead baby on a garage shelf. While her two eldest, Jules and Nicolas, now 14 and 12, were sleeping, she burned the body in the fireplace and put the ashes out with the rubbish.
Three years later, Jean-Louis was transferred to Seoul, South Korea, where he worked for a US company. Véronique and the boys followed him. The Courjaults were active members of the French expatriate community, and Véronique worked as a teacher’s aide in the French kindergarten. A short, stocky woman, she often lost and gained weight and no one – not even her husband – noticed her pregnancies.
In Seoul, disposing of the bodies was more complicated. The apartment building was equipped with video surveillance cameras, and a servant sorted the rubbish, so Courjault hid the babies in the freezer. When the family moved, she transferred the tiny corpses to the freezer in the new apartment.
In July 2006, when Véronique was on holiday in France with Jules and Nicolas, Jean-Louis went to the cellar to store some fish he had been given and discovered the dead babies in the freezer. He called the Korean police, who allowed him to join his wife and children in France.
DNA tests in Korea established that the Courjaults were the parents of the dead infants. For three months, the couple claimed someone must have put the babies in the freezer, that the police had made a mistake. French authorities repeated the DNA tests, with the same results. When she was questioned for the fifth time, in October 2006, Véronique confessed to suffocating the babies, and revealed the murder of the first infant in 1999. She swore that Jean-Louis knew nothing of her pregnancies. He had been charged as an accomplice but was cleared in January 2009.
Nothing in Courjault's nine-day trial adequately explained why an apparently devoted wife and mother would do such a thing. "We are before unfathomable mysteries," said Courjault's lawyer, Henri Leclerc. Experts explained the phenomenon of "pregnancy denial", which reportedly affects some 2,000 women in France every year. According to Libérationnewspaper, at least 230 women discover they are pregnant at the moment of birth. Some continue to menstruate. Michel Dubec, a psychiatrist, called it "mental abortion" through which "all thoughts having to do with the pregnancy are ignored or forgotten. The information is rejected, cancelled. And this blank remains even after the infanticide."
The strongest clue to Courjault’s damaged psyche came early in the trial, when her two brothers, four sisters and parents testified. The sixth of seven children, Courjault grew up on a farm with outhouses instead of toilets. Her parents were wine growers and her mother, Monique Fièvre, often complained of exhaustion, telling her children she’d be “better off dead”.
Courjault told a psychiatrist: “I considered it was none of society’s business, that it was a personal problem, that it was my body.” After her third hidden pregnancy, she nearly died from a uterine infection, and underwent a hysterectomy. The operation was “a relief” and “one of the happiest periods of my life”, she said.
On the last day of her trial, her face streaked with tears, Courjault said she had tried to explain herself. “I know my words weren’t good enough most of the time. I want to say that I know I killed our children, and that is a fact that will stay with me.”
Jean-Louis Courjault said it meant a lot to him that his wife referred to “our” children. In an interview with RTL radio after the verdict, he said the dead babies “are part of our life” and will be given a resting place once their bodies are returned.
Jean-Louis Courjault said he did not abandon his wife “because I have feelings for her . . . When Véronique told me she’d done it, all I could do was hold her in my arms, because it was obviously the sign of very great suffering . . . We are guilty of having seen nothing.”
In Tuesday's Healthplus, Sheila Wayman examines the pregnancy denial phenomenon