Читать книгу Parents Who Kill - Shocking True Stories of The World's Most Evil Parents - Carol Anne Davis - Страница 18

Sometimes a mother murders her children and takes her secrets with her to the grave, as in a recent British case where a woman in her seventies died, having gone through three marriages which produced eight known children. In May 2008, one of her adult daughters was clearing out her late mother’s house in Manchester when she found an egg crate hidden at the back of a wardrobe. The crate held two towel-wrapped toy boxes which she opened to reveal two decomposing babies. The remains were at different stages of decomposition so the children hadn’t died at the same time. The crate also contained a newspaper from 1956.

Police said that they’d have to do DNA tests on the remains to establish that they were indeed the woman’s children, adding that the dead woman’s family were deeply shocked as they were aware that the infants were probably their siblings. They would never know why she had killed two of her infants yet let others live.

An 18-year-old boy had a similarly gruesome experience in Wenden near Frankfurt in May 2007 when his 44-year-old mother was away from home and he went rooting deep inside the family freezer in search of a pizza. Instead, he unearthed three tiny corpses wrapped in plastic bags.

His alcoholic mother, Monika Halbe, admitted secretly giving birth to a baby in 1986 and to two more between 2003 and 2007. She said that she had hidden the babies but that she hadn’t murdered them. However, the prosecution countered that the first had died of suffocation or neglect and that one of the others had been drowned.

She was jailed for four years and three months for the most recent deaths, but wasn’t tried for the baby born in 1986 because of the statute of limitations, more than 20 years having elapsed.

There have been similar cases elsewhere in Europe, with families belatedly realising that their mothers were effectively serial killers.