Austrian police find four newborns' bodies
In a gruesome discovery that stunned usually tranquil Austria, police said today they found the bodies of four newborns – two stuffed in a freezer and two entombed in paint buckets filled with cement – at an apartment complex.
Authorities charged the infants’ 32-year-old mother with murder, saying she confessed to killing them out of despair over her inability to pay bills and fear that having a child might drive away her long-time male partner. The companion also was placed under investigation.
The grisly killings and disposals, which authorities in the southern city of Graz said may have begun three years ago, shocked the alpine nation, where multiple homicides are rare, and led to calls for more assistance for women who have crisis pregnancies.
Police said two of the bodies were found in the freezer of the apartment building in Graz, about 120 miles south of Vienna and a few miles from the birthplace of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Authorities arrested the woman and her 38-year-old partner yesterday, police said.
Austrian state broadcaster ORF said two bodies were wrapped in plastic bags and stuffed in the freezer, and a third – a newborn girl – was placed in a paint bucket that was filled with cement to conceal the remains.
Specially trained police sniffer dogs led investigators to the body in the bucket, ORF reported.
Police searching the house and an adjacent garden shed today for clues to the killings came across the fourth body, which was also in a paint bucket filled with cement, hidden beneath a pile of debris in the shed, officials said.
Graz’s Kleine Zeitung newspaper reported that the first of the bodies was discovered on Monday by a resident of the apartment block when the man – who went down to the basement to get ice cream for his children – opened a chest freezer shared by the building’s occupants.
Stunned, the tenant called police, who later located a second body in the freezer, buried beneath frozen meat and vegetables.
Although police initially considered the possibility that the infants may have been stillborn, evidence at the scene quickly suggested the newborns were killed before their bodies were stuffed in the freezer, they said in a statement.
The woman lived in the building with her partner for the past eight years, authorities said.
Police Lt Col Werner Jud said today the woman was not entirely coherent during questioning, but told investigators she gave birth to all the babies in her bath.
Post mortems were held, but results had not yet been released officials said. They said the forensic examination was held up by the need to first slowly thaw the frozen remains of the infants found in the freezer.
Jud said DNA tests would be carried out on the woman’s companion to determine if he was the babies’ father.
