When Parents Kill Their Kids

June 18, 2009— -- A French court today sentenced a woman accused of killing three of her children to eight years in prison, bringing to a close the high-profile case known as "L'affaire des bébés congelés" -- or "the case of the frozen babies".

The episode of multiple infanticide stunned the French public when the first details came out in July 2006, after the bodies of two babies were found in the freezer of a French expatriate couple living in Seoul, South Korea.

Jean-Louis Courjault, a 42-year-old French expatriate working in South Korea as an engineer, made the horrible discovery when he was trying to find room for some mackerels in the family freezer. He immediately alerted the South Korean police.

His wife Veronique, 41, and their two boys, aged today 11 and 14, were in France for the summer vacation, but Jean-Louis Courjault was allowed by South Korean authorities to join them in France after giving DNA samples to South Korean investigators.

After he rejoined his family in Tours, about 60 miles southwest of Paris, he and his wife appeared in front of the international press on Aug. 10, 2006, after being questioned by French investigators.

"We can't explain it to ourselves, we don't understand," Veronique Courjault told reporters at the time.

"What we know, and we're absolutely certain of that, is that we are not the parents of these two children," her husband said.

But new DNA tests were carried out and confirmed what the South Korean police had previously determined: Despite their denials, the Courjaults were the parents of the two children found dead in the freezer in Seoul.

French police arrested Veronique Courjault on Oct. 10, 2006. After first she denied any wrongdoing, before she finally confessed to the double infanticide and swore that her husband did not know anything.

She said she hid her pregnancies by wearing oversize clothes and gave birth in September 2002 and December 2003 on her own in a bathtub. She also confessed to a third infanticide in 1999 in the Charente-Maritime region of France, where the family lived at the time.

Veronique Courjault initially faced the possibility of a life sentence. However, the general prosecutor asked the jury to sentence her to 10 years in prison -- likely because she still has two children.