Women sentenced in trials that gripped France

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(New York Times)
Updated: 2009-06-19 11:46

PARIS - Two murder cases that have riveted France in the last week came to an end Thursday, with both female defendants sentenced to relatively lenient prison terms.

Women sentenced in trials that gripped France

Monique Fievre and Robert Fievre, parents of Veronique Courjault, leave court at the end of their daughter's trial in Tours, central France, June 18, 2009. Courjault, a Frenchwoman who strangled three of her newborn babies and stored two of them in the family freezer, was sentenced to eight years in jail on Thursday after a trial that focused on her psychiatric problems. [Agencies]

In one, a mother murdered three of her babies, hid two of the bodies in a freezer and burned the other, without her family knowing she was ever pregnant. In the second, a rich businessman in a flesh-colored latex body suit was shot dead by his lover in what she said was a crime of passion.

In the culmination of a three-year saga, Véronique Courjault, 41, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the murders of three of her children while they were babies between 1999 and 2006. Prosecutors had requested only 10 years, because of Ms Courjault's emotional state.

Ms Courjault's crimes came to light in July 2006 in South Korea, where she was then living with her husband, Jean-Louis, an engineer for a car-parts company, and their two teenage sons. While his wife and the two sons were on vacation in France, Mr Courjault discovered the bodies of two babies when he went to put fish in the freezer.

Mr Courjault, who denied any knowledge of the murders, and even that his wife had been pregnant, was allowed to join his wife and sons in France after providing a DNA sample that ultimately proved that the couple were the parents of the babies. Mr Courjault was never charged.

Ms Courjault confessed to the killings in October, eliminating that element of mystery from the trial but leaving one that figured prominently in the defense and in kitchen table conversations around France: How was Ms Courjault able to hide three pregnancies from her family?

The answer, provided by a string of experts, was a neurosis called pregnancy denial.

"I was conscious that I was pregnant," Ms Courjault testified. "But all of a sudden I wasn’t anymore. It was lost." She added, "If there was a dissimulation, it was first inside of me."

Marie-Pierre Courtellemont, a journalist who covered the trial and wrote a book on the case, said the public perception of Ms Courjault quickly changed.

"She went from being seen as a monster to being seen as a victim of her own self," Ms Courtellemont said. "It helped that the public could relate. Infanticides were usually associated with poor backgrounds and teen pregnancy. But there you had a middle-class, bourgeois family, educated people. It made people think, 'This could be me.'"

In the other case, Cécile Brossard, 40, facing a maximum 10-year sentence, was given eight-and-a-half years for the murder during sadomasochistic sex play of Édouard Stern, the heir to a French banking fortune. Mr Stern, who was 50 at the time of his murder in 2005, was found shot four times in his house in Geneva, where the trial took place.

Ms Brossard met Mr Stern in 2002, when she was working in a leather goods store at a Paris airport. Their torrid affair ended in early 2005, when Ms Brossard asked her lover for $1 million dollars "as a gesture of love." Mr. Stern accepted but then changed his mind.

Ms Brossard said that on the night of the murder, Mr Stern asked her to tie him to a chair. She said she lost control and shot him when he told her, "One million dollars is a lot of money for a prostitute."

The court rejected her defense of a crime of passion. But she told the court, "You can question me for hours. I'll never say I loved him for his money."