GERMANY: Germany's shocking infanticide trial has ended with a 15-year prison sentence for a 40-year-old dental technician, who killed nine of her babies shortly after birth and hid their bodies.
Dressed in a dark brown suit, dark-haired Sabine Hilschenz remained expressionless as she was convicted yesterday of manslaughter in the eastern city of Frankfurt-Oder.
Hilschenz, a mother of four, declined to testify during the trial 10 months after neighbours discovered the tiny skeletons of seven boys and two girls in the garden of Hilschenz's parents, in the eastern Brandenburg village of Brieskow-Finkenheerd.
After her arrest, Hilschenz denied any involvement until DNA evidence linked her to the babies. She then admitted giving birth to nine babies from 1988 to 1998 and leaving them to die, before hiding their bodies in any containers large enough: a red baby bath; yellow plastic buckets; flower pots and a fish tank.
The short 10-day trial painted a grim portrait of the lonely life of Hilschenz, from a childhood dominated by a mother who suppressed all conflict situations in the family, to marriage aged 18 to an officer with the East German secret police. He declined to testify but claimed not to have noticed his wife's nine pregnancies.
The couple, now divorced, have three grown-up children and Hilschenz has a two-year-old child with another partner.
The court awarded the maximum 15-year manslaughter sentence, ruling that Hilschenz had failed her legal responsibilities as a mother to take care of her babies.
Defence attorney Matthias Schöneburg announced an appeal arguing that Hilschenz could only be directly linked to one death.
Hilschenz told investigators how she gave birth to her first baby aged 18 but, after the third child at 21, her husband said he didn't want any more. She gave birth, for the fourth time, secretly in her bathroom, telling police the child drowned in the toilet bowl. That case was disregarded because it was now outside the statute of limitations.
With each successive pregnancy, Hilschenz told investigators she drank heavily when she felt contraction pains coming on and woke up the following morning with no memory of giving birth or of burying the bodies.