A woman has been taken into police custody under assisted witness status after the remains of a newborn baby were discovered in Vannes last weekend. This mother walked free after being brought before a judge.
The calm of a suburban district of Vannes has been disturbed by a sordid legal case. A newborn corpse was discovered by the police on Sunday June 18, 2023. A judicial investigation for intentional homicide was opened by the Lorient prosecutor’s office (Morbihan). The baby’s mother was placed under the assisted witness regime, which allowed her to be released from police custody.
A friend of the couple contacted law enforcement after a phone call with the husband. He would have explained to him, according to France 3, that “his wife had just confessed to him that she had had a miscarriage three years earlier and had kept the body of the baby in their garage.” The husband reportedly confronted his wife upon discovering the baby’s body by chance last weekend. Once there, the police found the remains of a “small body” in a closed plastic bag and placed in a backpack.
The baby could have been viable according to the investigation
According West France, “seals taped to the doors of a parked vehicle attest to the arrival of investigators for ‘murder of a minor’ and ‘concealment of a corpse'”. This second count is against the father, because he was digging a hole in his garden when the police arrived.
The prosecution told France Blue that the “scanner and autopsy, carried out on Monday, make it possible to determine that this baby had, at the time of his death, 40 weeks of gestational development. He did not present any malformation, nor bone pathology, nor visible trauma. He could therefore have be viable, but there is no element at this stage to confirm whether he was born alive or not. At the cervical level, a sort of clothing cord was found, with a double loop”.
The mother would have hidden from her husband the existence of this corpse in their garage
Stéphane Kellenbergern, prosecutor of Lorient, spoke about this sad discovery. According to him, the wife explained that in 2019 “her husband was on the move, she would have suffered from severe abdominal pain and that a little boy would have arrived ‘suddenly’, stillborn according to her. She would have then placed her body in a sheet, then in a plastic bag and in the backpack, hiding everything in the garage.About the cord found in the cervical area, she told the police that she had wanted to ‘dress’ the child of something.”
Also questioned, the husband admitted to having been aware of this pregnancy. But he claims that his wife explained to him that she had suffered a miscarriage. The Lorient public prosecutor’s office therefore emphasizes that “both the advanced stage of development of the child, the absence of malformation, the absence of monitoring of the pregnancy, then the concealment of the body, as well as the presence of the cord around the cervical , lead to the suspicion of intentional homicide.