It is a mystery that has gripped France. A well-educated and well-liked expatriate family were living in Seoul with their two young sons. One day, the father found the corpses of two newborn babies in the family freezer. Baffled, he called the police. The couple flatly denied the babies were theirs, but a DNA test proved otherwise.
The story inspired a novel by the daughter of former French president Francois Mitterrand, a national outpouring and a new focus on a spate of infanticides across France over the last decade.
As Veronique Courjault, the mother of the frozen babies, goes on trial in France for murder today facing possible life imprisonment, the nation is braced for a new round of soul-searching over the psychological difficulties that can hit some pregnant women. Judges will have to decide whether Courjault was in denial of her pregnancies or was conscious of what she was doing.
She has spent two-and-a-half years on remand in prison and her family insists she is not a danger to society.
In 2006, the Courjaults were living in a smart expat villa on a high-security estate in the South Korean capital. Jean-Louis Courjault worked as an engineer for a multinational company and was often away from home. His wife, described as a devoted mother to her sons, aged nine and 11, did yoga with other mothers and had worked as a classroom assistant at the local French school. On July 23, 2006, after his wife and sons had left for their annual summer trip to France, Courjault returned to Seoul on business. He bought fish and went down to the family’s basement freezer, which he wouldn’t normally open. There he found the corpses.
Courjault was allowed to fly back to France to be with his wife. Holding hands, they held a press conference insisting they were not the parents and were puzzled by the find. Weeks later, DNA tests proved they were the parents, and both were arrested.
Under questioning by French police, Veronique confessed to hiding two pregnancies from her husband in 2002 and 2003, giving birth alone in the bathroom before strangling each baby and storing them in the freezer. She also confessed to killing another newborn while the couple still lived in France in 1999, disposing of the body in the family’s fireplace.
She told psychiatrists she had not felt the babies move in her womb during pregnancy.
“For me, it was never children, it was a part of me, a prolongation of myself that I killed,” she said.
She explained feeling out of her depth at the thought of having more children. Earlier this year, a judge found Jean-Louis Courjault innocent of knowing anything about the pregnancies or the babies’ deaths.
After the verdict, Courjault said: “Another battle is now starting against society’s received ideas. Society has to admit that not all pregnancies are happy. My wife certainly has a problem of a psychological order.”
Now living in France and raising the couple’s two sons, he has forgiven his wife and wants her home from prison to rejoin the family.
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