A woman has been taken into custody under suspicion of committing double infanticide following the discovery of a frozen newborn’s body hidden in a refrigerator. The arrest of the woman, aged in her 50s, took place in Boulogne-Billancourt, an affluent suburb of Paris, after the bodies of two infants were found in Aillevillers-et-Lyaumont, a town located in Haute-Saône, northwest France. She confessed to preserving the babies in a frozen state a month after their birth, revealing that she had concealed her pregnancies and delivered the children at home.
According to sources familiar with the case, the arrest occurred after a man stumbled upon one of the baby’s bodies concealed in a freezer. The initial discovery prompted a police response to the man’s residence in Aillevillers-et-Lyaumont, where they subsequently located the remains of a second child.
An investigating magistrate disclosed that the suspect, a mother of nine with no prior criminal record, had given birth at home and departed in December. Following the distressing finding, she was apprehended approximately 186 miles away in the Paris region, where one of her sons resides. The local authorities in Aillevillers-et-Lyaumont were notified of the incident, leading to street closures overnight without revealing the specifics of the case initially.
The mayor of the town, Jean-Claude Tramesel, expressed shock upon learning the reason behind the street closures, stating that the small community of 1,500 inhabitants was taken aback by the news. He mentioned that the woman and her partner had lived inconspicuously in the town for about twenty years, not attracting attention to themselves.
The investigation into the case has been entrusted to the Lure Criminal Investigation Brigade and the Besançon Criminal Investigation Section, with prosecutors indicating that the infants were placed in the freezer sometime between 2011 and 2018. During a press briefing, Besançon prosecutor Cédric Logelin revealed that the babies were found wrapped in bags through technical and scientific police procedures. The woman acknowledged being the mother of the infants found in the freezer but was uncertain about the exact dates of their births. She confessed to giving birth at home, wrapping the newborns immediately, and placing them in the freezer, noting that she was the sole user of the appliance.
