She explained to investigators that her child was stillborn during a miscarriage suffered in 2019. A version that police officers in Vannes and Rennes sometimes found difficult to believe. Tuesday, June 20, a judicial investigation was opened by the Lorient prosecutor’s office for suspicion of murder targeting a 39-year-old woman. This mother of four living in Vannes (Morbihan), is suspected of having killed her infant in 2019 and then of having hidden her body for almost four years in the garage of the family home. The husband of the respondent is suspected of concealment of a corpse, specifies the parquet floor of Lorient. Sunday, June 18, he had discovered the lifeless body of a little boy while going to look for an object in the garage. He would have decided to bury the “very degraded” remains of a baby in his garden.
When he learned the news on Sunday, the 41-year-old man confided in a friend. It was the latter who alerted the police, explaining that her friend was “apparently panicked” by the discovery of the body. “Dispatched to the scene, the police found the man digging a hole in the garden,” explains prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger.
Investigators discovered “the remains of a small body” in a closed plastic bag hidden in a backpack. The scanner and the autopsy carried out at the Nantes forensic institute “made it possible to determine that this baby had, at the time of his death, 40 weeks of gestational development. He had no malformation, bone pathology or visible trauma. He could therefore have been viable, but there was no element at this stage to say whether he was born alive or not, ”specifies the prosecution. One element particularly intrigued the pathologist: a kind of clothing cord with a double loop was found around the baby’s neck. The mother allegedly explained that she had wanted to “put on” the child with a garment.
“A desired child” but “a complicated marital context”
This element prompted the judge to open a judicial investigation for murder and concealment of a corpse because of the facts of concealment which “allowed to suspect intentional homicide”. The mother had explained that she had not followed this fifth pregnancy medically evoking “a desired child” but “a complicated marital context”. She would have seen the little boy arrive “suddenly” assuring that he was “stillborn”. The husband explained that he was aware of the pregnancy but that his wife had simply told him that she had had a miscarriage. The latter was placed under the assisted witness regime. She was left free.