Murderous Mental Instability

Infanticide is a difficult crime to understand.  How it can be that a father or a mother might destroy the life of a child.  Their own child, although child-murder is a spine-chilling crime when committed by anyone, including strangers murdering someone else's child. 

A Quebec cardiologist, Guy Turcotte, whose physician-wife had left him, pleaded temporary insanity when he murdered their children, Olivier and Anne-Sophie Turcotte, ages 5 and 3.  He was acquitted of the capital offences on the basis of his insanity plea. And now, a few years later, is out on unsupervised day-long parole, seemingly quite at peace with himself. 

One can assume that these self-assured people who become psychotic and commit dreadful offences against humanity have compromised personalities, born as psychopathically deranged individuals who cannot find it within themselves to wholly relate to others, to have compassion, to restrain their basest impulses.

From Berlin comes another story of a woman who felt that having babies would compromise her relationship with her husband.  She chose to kill no fewer than five babies to which she had given serial birth, fearing her husband would leave their family if she had any more children.  Can anyone possibly be that ignorant of contraception techniques?

How is it possible that a young woman in her twenties could be so devoid of feeling that she would feel compelled to murder her babies rather than confront her husband, explaining to him that conception is never immaculate? 

At age 28, after a six-year investigation by German police, the unnamed woman (to protect the identities of her still-living children, 8 and 10) made a "comprehensive confession".

Her pregnancies must have been difficult to detect physically for she gave birth in secret, at home or out in the surrounding woods.  "She had the impression her husband would leave her if she had any more children, and that's why she didn't tell anyone she was pregnant, including her husband", explained Ulrike Stahlmann-Liebelt, chief prosecutor in Flensburg, northern Germany.

Although it is unclear how the woman managed to keep news of her pregnancy private, her husband claims not to have known anything about the pregnancies.  The first dead infant was discovered in a paper-sorting station, 15 kilometres from the family's home in Husum.  The second in a parking lot off a regional highway, a year later, in 2007.

DNA confirmed the bodies were related.  Thereafter the woman hid the three later dead infants in boxes in the basement of the building where the family resided.  The police investigation included hundreds of DNA tests from local women after authorities concluded where the parents were likely to have come from, on Germany's north sea coast.

Fully realizing that the DNA sample would divulge her to be the mother of the two initial dead babies themselves linked by forensics, the woman surrendered herself to authorities, confessed, and is now in custody awaiting a formal indictment.