French mum 'relieved' after admission

30/07/2010 | 08:13 PM

The French mother who admitted killing eight of her newborn babies is relieved that her secret is finally out in the open, her lawyer said on Friday in a case that has shocked the country.

Stunned relatives voiced disbelief that Dominique Cottrez, 45, hid eight pregnancies and births and smothered the newborns, whose bodies were found in plastic bin bags in the quiet northern village of Villers-au-Tertre.

Cottrez has been charged with murder after police found the skeletal remains of the eight infants buried in a garden and hidden under household clutter in a garage.

"She doesn't have to carry this on her conscience any more, and that's a kind of relief," her lawyer Frank Berton told reporters, adding that she was "tired, worn out and battered down" after her questioning.

Stunned residents in the village laid flowers at the houses where the babies were found, and the French media reached out to psychological experts to try to understand how a mother could kill so many babies.

"It's incomprehensible. We can't believe something like this could happen," Dominique Cottrez's brother-in-law Yves Cottrez was quoted as saying by the daily Le Parisien.

"And my brother saw nothing, even though he sleeps next to his wife ... but Dominique was always heavily built, it didn't show when she was pregnant with her two daughters."

Press reports said that Cottrez weighed 130 kilos.

Cottrez was charged with murder on Thursday after she admitted suffocating the eight newborns "because she did not want more children and wished to avoid seeing a doctor for contraception", prosecutor Eric Vaillant told reporters.

The new owners of her parents' former home found the remains of two newborns buried in their garden as they planted a tree at the weekend.

The remains of the other six infants were later found dumped, also in plastic sacks, in the garage of the mother's current home.

Berton said Cottrez would undergo psychological tests to determine whether she was fully responsible for her acts, and praised his client for immediately cooperating with investigators after her arrest on Tuesday.

"For her part, she's said what is essential," he said. "To analyse why it happened, that she doesn't know."

Cottrez faces trial and life imprisonment. Her husband Pierre-Marie Cottrez was freed after denying any knowledge of the killings or the eight pregnancies.

"We're in disbelief," one of the couple's daughters, Virginie, 21, told the regional newspaper La Voix du Nord. "Mum was always secretive, but she never judged us. She accompanied us and supported us."

Local priest Robert Meignotte on Thursday placed eight candles outside the couple's current home where most of the remains were found.

"I'm very upset," he said. "I baptise five children every Sunday in the 17 villages of the parish. You don't just throw children out like that in a big bag. It's incomprehensible."

It followed a string of similar cases in France in recent years, in which isolated and troubled mothers killed their newborns.

Earlier this year a mother was convicted of killing six of her newborn children and hiding them in the cellar of her house in northwestern France.

Another mother was jailed in June 2009 for smothering two boys born in secret at her expatriate home in South Korea, and a third child born in France, and hiding them in a freezer.

Investigators said Dominique Cottrez had confessed to suffocating her own babies shortly after their births between 1989 and 2006 or 2007.

"Now it's out in the open, mum must feel relieved," her other daughter, Emiline, 22, told La Voix du Nord newspaper. "She has nothing more to hide."