14-year jail for German mother in baby deaths
Print Edition
A woman on trial in one of Germany’s worst infanticide cases was convicted yesterday of killing four of her babies and handed a 14-year jail sentence.
Andrea Goeppner, 45, was found to have murdered the four newborns, whose remains were discovered wrapped in towels and plastic bags last year, in a case that has horrified the country. Her estranged husband, Johann Goeppner, 55, was acquitted on charges of complicity for failing to stop the killings, which took place between 2003 and 2013.
Prosecutors at the regional court in the southern city of Coburg had demanded a life sentence for Andrea Goeppner, who was originally arrested on suspicion of killing up to eight of her babies.
Their bodies were uncovered at her home in the small Bavarian town of Wallenfels following a tip-off from a neighbor.
However, prosecutors were unable to pursue murder charges for the other four infants, as one was found to have been stillborn and three were so badly decomposed that it was unclear whether they were viable at birth.
Defense lawyers had called for the charges to be reduced to involuntary manslaughter.
Presiding judge Christoph Gillot defended the decision to stop short of a life sentence.
“When a case like this is tried, you suddenly have a lot of people who know what the right thing to do is — that a supposed ‘horror mother’ should be locked away forever,” DPA news agency quoted him as saying. “But we first must try to understand this behavior. It doesn’t mean justifying it but rather trying to comprehend it.”
Andrea Goeppner confessed, in a statement read out by her lawyer, to killing several of her babies but added that she could not remember how many.
She said she had given birth to each of the eight babies at home alone and had wrapped every infant in a hand towel.
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