THE WOMAN at the centre of the gruesome French infanticide case is reportedly ‘relieved’ that her secret is now out in the open.
Dominique Cottrez, a nursing assistant in her mid-40s, confessed on Wednesday to killing ten of her own children by suffocation, after the new occupants of her old house found their bones in the garden.
Now her lawyer, Frank Berton, says “she doesn’t have to carry this on her conscience any more, and that’s a kind of relief.” He added that she was “tired, worn out and battered down” after facing intensive police questioning.
Cottrez will now undergo psychological tests to determine whether she was fully responsible for her actions, and said he believed that prosecutors may have been “a bit quick” to say she was fully aware of what she had done.
Her two adult children, who had no idea of their mother’s actions, said she was a “doting grandmother … who supported us at all times.”
It is believed Cottrez began smothering her children after enduring difficulties delivering one of her two surviving children, but was able to hide her pregnancies in her 20-stone bulk.
Her husband, a local councillor, also claims to have known nothing of his wife’s actions.
Cottrez’s is the third high-profile case of infanticide in France in the last eighteen months, with all three mothers understood to be suffering from ‘pregnancy denial‘.
Cottrez could face charges of voluntary homicide of the babies.
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