Accused in French infanticide case faces life in prison

It was, a lawyer for an association that is suing Dominique Cottrez said, "an extraordinary crime committed by an ordinary woman".

Ms Cottrez went on trial in the northern town of Douai today on charges of murder by suffocation of eight newborn infants, in what is believed to be the worst case of infanticide in French history.

Judges, lawyers and the public are trying to understand how a quiet, apparently gentle 51-year-old grandmother who worked as a care-giver for the elderly for 26 years became a serial killer.

The crime was discovered in July 2010, when the new owners of a house that had belonged to Ms Cottrez’s parents began to dig a duck pond in the garden. They found two tiny skeletons buried in plastic bags.

Ms Cottrez’s obesity – she is 1.55m tall and weighs 162kg – enabled her to hide her pregnancies. When she bore her first child, a daughter, the midwife had mocked her as “fatso”. The doctor, she told psychiatrists, “was cold, almost contemptuous. He treated me like an animal.”

Ms Cottrez vowed that no doctor would see her body again. Her husband and family were shocked when she produced a second daughter without their having known she was pregnant. It was that anecdote, recounted by her entourage, that led police to Cottrez when the first two bodies were discovered. She immediately confessed to having suffocated six others and hiding them in rubbish bags in the attic, hanging cupboard and garage.

Ms Cottrez was the youngest of five children. Her father, Oscar Lempereur, was a farmer. He sexually assaulted her for the first time when she was eight years old, and raped her when she was 12. Ms Cottrez met her husband, Pierre-Marie, a carpenter, when she was 19. After the birth of her first daughter, Lempereur asked her if she wanted to resume her "affaire" with him.

“Why not?” Ms Cottrez told her father, as recounted in psychiatrists’ reports. “I liked my father because he was my father and at the same time I felt something else. At the end of the day, I wanted that man; for me, he was the one who loved me most.”

The father and daughter met on his farm two or three times a month. Although he “was careful”, Ms Cottrez feared each child was the result of incest. (DNA tests have shown that all were her husband’s.) The first baby she suffocated, in December 1989, was a boy. She didn’t look to see the gender of the seven who followed. At the prosecutor’s insistence, all were given names before the trial started.

“I was ashamed. It didn’t occur to me to tell anyone. It was too shocking and I didn’t want my father to go to prison,” Ms Cottrez told psychiatrists. Oscar Lempereur died in 2007. “If he were still alive, I would never have said it,” she said.

The trial was delayed for four years while courts disputed whether Ms Cottrez’s crimes fell outside the statute of limitations. She suffocated the last infant in the summer of 2000, some 10 years before the bodies were discovered.

The court of cassation, France’s supreme court, ruled that, as in financial cases, the statute of limitations started at the time of discovery, in July 2010, not in 1989-2000, when the murders were committed. The court said that increasingly there are no time limits for such crimes: “Sexual and blood crimes, in particular those committed against infants . . . are considered as atrocities that society . . . refuses to accept and forget.”

Ms Cottrez has already served two years, and risks life in prison.