Mother on trial for killing her five children

A BELGIAN woman went on trial yesterday for taking the lives of her five children in early 2007 by slitting their throats.

The two-week trial in the central town of Nivelles will focus on what drove the 42-year-old teacher Genevieve Lhermitte, who had been on sick leave for several years, to kill her four girls and boy, aged three to 14.

Lhermitte called the emergency services shortly after trying to commit suicide following the murders and has given her account.

In late February 2007, hours before her husband was due to return from a trip to Morocco, Lhermitte called her seven-year-old daughter upstairs, saying she had a surprise. Lhermitte strangled and then cut the throat of the girl with a large kitchen knife.

Then over the next hour, she killed her four other children in the same way. She then put the children on their beds with stuffed animals in their arms and stabbed herself in the thorax. She then called the police.

“I have taken the decision to go very far away with my children forever,” she said in a farewell letter to a friend shortly before the murders.

At the opening of the trial, Lhermitte described herself as a “teacher and a mother” and avoided looking at her husband, whom she has accused of being deaf to her depression and distress ahead of the murders.