THE MOTHER of eight newborn babies whose corpses were found in a village in northern France has confessed to killing them.
Dominique Cottrez, a 46-year-old care worker, has been formally placed under investigation – a preliminary stage before criminal charges – and remains in police custody, prosecutor Eric Vaillant told a press conference in the town of Douai, south of Lille, yesterday.
Mr Vaillant said the woman told police that her husband was not aware of her pregnancies or her decision to kill the babies. He has been released without charge.
“She explained that she didn’t want more children and that she didn’t want to see a doctor to avail of contraception,” Mr Vaillant said, adding that her first pregnancy had been a terrible experience.
Police are not yet certain of the precise dates of each child’s death, but “there were births between 1989 and 2006 or 2007,” the prosecutor said. He said police were still looking for other bodies, but Ms Cottrez had said there were no more. Psychological tests were being conducted to assess her criminal responsibility.
“This is an out-of-the-ordinary case given the number of newborns,” said Mr Vaillant. “We are trying to understand what happened.”
Ms Cottrez and her husband are well known in Villers-au-Tertre, a quiet commuter village of some 700 people that has grown in recent years thanks to improved road connections to cities such as Lille, Arras and Lens.
Locals said Ms Cottrez was born and raised in the village, while her husband came from a nearby town. It was in a farmhouse on Rue de Fressain, which once belonged to the woman’s late parents, that the remains of two babies were found by the current owners while digging in their garden last Saturday.
When police were alerted, they traced the find back to the Cottrez couple, who had sold the farmhouse and moved to a new, modern home on Sentier du Pré, a residential cul de sac on a hill at the other end of the village.
Police found the corpses of six newborn babies wrapped in plastic bags and hidden in a garage behind this house.
The couple have two adults daughters, aged 21 and 22, as well as two grandchildren. The local paper, La Voix du Nord, yesterday quoted one of their daughters as saying Ms Cottrez was a courageous and supportive mother.
“We never noticed anything. There were times when she was tired, that’s true, but she worked nearly 24 hours out of 24, between her work as a home-care assistant and the housework at home,” the daughter was quoted as saying.
Locals described the couple as kind, ordinary people who were well known in the community. Some portrayed Ms Cottrez as shy and somewhat reclusive, but the owner of the Café des Sports, who asked not to be named, disputed this. “She was reserved, but that’s all. She didn’t go out much, but when there were festivities, we’d see her.”
It is believed the Villiers-au-Tertre infanticide case may be the biggest modern France has seen, but the country has had a series of high-profile cases in recent years in which parents have killed their newborn babies.
One mother, Céline Lesage, was sentenced to 15 years in prison last March for suffocating or strangling six of her newborn babies between 2000 and 2007. Her crimes came to light in October 2007 when the father of one of the dead babies discovered a decomposing corpse in a rubbish bag in their cellar in the Manche region of northwestern France.
Lesage (38) confessed to concealing the pregnancies, then giving birth alone before strangling two infants and suffocating four others. She told the court that she could not explain why she had killed the babies.
Another woman, Véronique Courjault, was released from prison last May, having been convicted for killing three of her newborn children between 1999 and 2003. Ms Courjault’s husband found two of the corpses in a freezer while the couple were living in Seoul, South Korea.