Jean-Louis Courjault was only looking for room in the freezer of his garage in Seoul. What he found beneath the packages of food were two bags containing the bodies of two newborns.
He called the French consulate, convinced there had been a mistake, that someone else had lived in that house before. South Korean police took DNA samples. The result was devastating: the babies were his and his wife Véronique’s children, and she was at that moment on vacation in France with her other two children.
For two months she denied everything, even to investigators. Then she confessed: she had given birth alone, in her own home, three times between 1999 and 2003, without her husband, her children, or anyone around her noticing the pregnancies. She killed each baby at birth. She burned one in the fireplace in France; she kept the other two in the freezer in Seoul.
Psychiatrists spoke of ‘denial of pregnancy.’ In 2009, the French courts sentenced her to eight years. She was released in 2010.
