E.A mother from Solingen has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of five of her six children. The Wuppertal district court found the 28-year-old German guilty on Thursday and determined the particular severity of the guilt, which almost excludes her release from prison after 15 years.
The children were between one and eight years old. Only the eldest son of the woman survived the crime. The housewife had insidiously killed the five children by first anesthetizing them and then drowning or suffocating them one after the other, the prosecutor had said in his plea. Judge Jochen Kötter spoke of a “tragedy”.
The trigger for the act, which caused horror nationwide, was, according to the investigators, a photo that showed the woman’s husband with a new partner at his side. The 28-year-old then announced to her husband via chat that he would not see his children again.
The children’s bodies were discovered covered in their beds on September 3 of last year. The defendant alleged that a stranger broke into her home, handcuffed her, forced her to type the chat messages and killed her children. Defense attorney Thomas Seifert had requested an acquittal. There are still doubts about his client’s perpetration.
The psychiatric and psychological experts appointed by the court had attested that the defendant was fully responsible. They found no evidence of a serious mental disorder. The district court heard more than 40 witnesses on 20 days of the trial.
Melina (1), Leonie (2), Sophie (3), Timo (6) and Luca (8) died at the hand of their mother, the court has now determined. The housewife then threw herself in front of a train in Düsseldorf Central Station, but survived. Her eldest son was physically unharmed. His mother had sent him to see his grandmother in the Lower Rhine region.