Court upholds sentence of mother who killed babies

Austria’s Supreme Court today upheld a life sentence of a woman who stuffed her newborn babies into a freezer or entombed them in cement-filled buckets.

In March, a court in the southern city of Graz, where four tiny bodies were discovered in rapid succession in the summer of 2005, convicted Gertraud Arzberger (aged 33), of three counts of murder and sentenced her to life in prison.

She had been tried on five counts, but had pleaded guilty to killing only four of her babies, and experts said they could not rule out that one of the four might have been stillborn.

The Supreme Court also ordered a retrial of the woman’s live-in companion, 39-year-old Johannes Genser.

In March, Genser was convicted as an accessory and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, after proclaiming his innocence and insisting he never noticed Arzberger was pregnant.

Neighbours, however, had testified that her swollen belly was obvious, and prosecutors said it was implausible to believe he did not know she was carrying the children.