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2008-05-06 09:07:40
By DANIELA PEGNA, Associated Press WriterMon May 5, 1:32 PM ET
A 44-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of killing three of her babies
after their bodies were discovered in the family freezer by her grown children
looking for pizza, police said Monday.
Police confirmed the grisly find Sunday night in the town of Wenden, near Olpe,
in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia after the woman turned herself
in, officials said.
The three infants are believed to have been born alive, but authorities were
awaiting autopsy results to determine how they died, said Johannes Daheim, a
spokesman for prosecutors investigating the case.
The woman, her 47-year-old husband and three adult children two sons, aged 18
and 22, and a 24-year-old daughter have lived in the town in a single-family
home since 1984.
The children discovered the frozen babies on Saturday afternoon while their
parents were away for the weekend, investigator Martin Feldmann said.
The 18-year-old and his sister had been looking for a frozen pizza and came
across a lot of expired food so decided to clean out the freezer.
The teenager then found three identical packets on the bottom of the freezer
and opened one and saw the head and arm of an infant that was wrapped in a hand
towel, police said.
The children confronted their parents when they returned home Sunday, and the
couple and their daughter then went to police together to tell authorities,
said Herbert Fingerhut, head of the police investigation, at a news conference.
The corpulent woman apparently concealed the three pregnancies, believed to
have been in the 1980s, not only from neighbors but also her own family,
Fingerhut said.
"It sounds unbelievable, but there are examples showing such things are
possible," he said.
The news of the discovery took other residents aback.
"I've been mayor for 14 years, and this is definitely the worst day I've seen,"
said Peter Brueser. "We will need a long time here to work through this."
It was the latest in a string of similar cases in Germany.
In the worst case, a woman was convicted of manslaughter in 2006 and sentenced
to the maximum 15 years in prison for killing eight of her newborn babies and
burying them in flower pots and a fish tank in the garden of her parents' home
near the German-Polish border.
More recently, police in February were called to a home in northern Germany
where a dead infant was discovered in the cellar.
In January, a 28-year-old German woman was charged with manslaughter after the
remains of three babies were discovered in her house and the home of a
relative. That woman has denied killing the babies.