Douai, France--A murder trial opened Thursday of a French housewife accused of killing eight of her children at birth which she claimed were from an incestuous relationship with her father.
Dominique Cottrez, a 51-year-old former health worker, was in tears even before the proceedings began in a northern French court in a case that has drawn outrage across the country.
She is accused of suffocating eight of her babies between 1989 and 2000 shortly after secretly giving birth to them on towels in the bathroom of her home near the Belgian border.
Cottrez's obesity made the pregnancies undetectable, even for her doctors as well as her husband and two adult daughters.
"Each time, I hoped the good Lord would do something, a miracle. Like someone would tell me, 'Look, you're pregnant.' Maybe then I would have said something, it would have triggered something in me and I would have gotten treatment," she told a local newspaper in January.
In the end the trigger came from outside when in July 2010 a new owner moved into the home of Cottrez's parents in the northern French village of Villers-au-Tertre and unearthed two bodies of infants wrapped in plastic bags buried in the garden.
Six more were later found in Cottrez's own home nearby.
Cottrez told investigators that she feared the babies were born from a sexual relationship with her father that had taken place from her childhood until his death in 2007.
AFP
