A 47-year-old woman has confessed to suffocating her eight new-born children and hiding their bodies in a village in northern France, the public prosecutor said.
The woman and her husband, also in his forties, were detained on Tuesday when the bodies were found wrapped in plastic bags at
two homes in Villers-au-Tertre, a sleepy village of about 650 people 200 kilometres north of Paris.
Dominique Cottrez, an auxiliary nurse, confessed in custody to killing two children at birth about 10 years ago, before admitting to the murder of six others, public prosector Eric Vaillant told a news conference.
“The mother knew she was pregnant ... she didn’t want any more children and didn’t want any doctors involved,” Vaillant said, adding her first pregnancy had been a terrible experience. Vaillant said the woman testified she had not told her husband about the pregnancies or her decision to kill the babies.
Her husband, a carpenter, has been released by police.