GERMANY: A 40-year-old unemployed woman appeared in a German court yesterday accused of killing nine babies shortly after giving birth to them and hiding their bodies in terracotta flowerpots.
The unprecedented case of infanticide was uncovered last July when German police found the tiny skeletons of seven boys and two girls in a village near the eastern border city of Frankfurt Oder.
Ms Sabine Hilschenz, a slight, dark-haired mother of four, declined to speak when she appeared in court at the first day of her trial yesterday. Dressed in a white sweater and jeans, she listened impassively as a state prosecutor told the court in Frankfurt Oder how she gave birth to nine babies in the decade until 1998.
In each case she wrapped the baby in a blanket, left it to die and hid the body. She hid the first two bodies in her freezer but later moved the bodies to her parents' garden, where she hid the remains of subsequent babies in flowerpots, buckets and a disused aquarium. A neighbour discovered the skeletons by chance last year while clearing out the garden in the eastern Brandenburg village of Brieskow-Finkenheerd.
DNA evidence proved that the babies belonged to Ms Hilschenz and her husband, Oliver. The couple, who divorced in 2005 after a difficult marriage, have three grown-up children and Ms Hilschenz has a two-year old child with another partner.
Oliver Hilschenz declined to testify yesterday but told police that he never noticed the nine pregnancies. Her three grown-up children, who live with their father, said the same.
In each case she gave birth alone, drinking heavily to dull the contraction pains, and told investigators that she would wake up the following day with no memory of burying the body. She said she found herself in a "vicious circle" and never went to a gynaecologist for fear of discovery.
The state prosecutor had pushed for murder charges, but the court, citing Ms Hilschenz's history of alcohol abuse, reduced the charges to eight cases of manslaughter.
The ninth case involves a baby that allegedly drowned in a toilet shortly after its birth in 1988 in what was still East Germany.
Under the laws of that country, the statute of limitations has already expired on this case.
Her lawyer, Matthias Schöneburg, is optimistic that she will be released without charge because there is no proof that she killed the babies.
"The findings of the investigation were inconclusive on this point," he said, adding that Ms Hilschenz was "relieved the trial is starting and that she will know her fate in a month's time".
But the woman dubbed the "horror mother" by German tabloids faces a battle for her own life after the case ends, as prison doctors have diagnosed her with a serious form of cancer.