Woman ‘suffocated her eight babies because she feared they were her father’s’

A woman is on trial in France accused of suffocating eight of her newborn babies because she feared they were children she had with her father. Dominique Cottrez, 51, told investigators she was raped by him, first when she was eight and then repeatedly through her childhood and teenage years. She said she later had a long, incestuous relationship with him when she was an adult, including after she married, and said it became consensual. She said she was in love with him more than she was with her husband Pierre-Marie Cottrez.

A means of contraception.

How Dominique Cottrez described the deaths of her children

Dominique Cottrez, who is accused of multiple counts of first-degree murder of minors, told the investigating judge she had never used contraception or had an abortion because she had a phobia of doctors. She said the killings in the northern village of Villers-au-Tertre had become a “means of contraception,” according to the judicial documents, in the worst infanticide case in modern French history. Her obesity appeared to hide the pregnancies, which went unnoticed by her husband, children, neighbours, colleagues and even hospital doctors.

Europe Suffocated eight babies