French mother faces 20 years for murdering 5 of her children

A French court yesterday jailed for 20 years a woman who killed five of her children right after they were born, a crime that was only solved over a decade after the corpses were discovered. The jury in Colmar in eastern France followed the recommendations of prosecutors in giving 55-year-old Sylvie Horning a 20-year prison term. Horning was found guilty of murdering the five children between 1990 and 2005.

The mother of three adult children hid her pregnancies from her partner, giving birth in secret and then strangling the newborns at her house in the eastern town of Wittelsheim. Nothing untoward was suspected until the discovery in 2003 of the bodies of four babies in rubbish bags in the nearby Galfingue forest.

But the initial investigation was closed in 2009 after it failed to yield any clues over who was be - hind the infants’ deaths. The probe was reopened in 2016 to take advantage of advances in DNA testing, and a year later investigators made a link between Horning and the babies, completely by chance, after her DNA was taken in a separate case following a fight with neighbours.

The samples revealed her to be the mother of the dead children. Horning admitted to strangling five of her children after giving birth to them in secret in a bathroom. The body of the fifth baby was found in a freezer at her home. Her partner, who died in 2018, had said he was completely unaware of the events. The defence argued that Horning’s psychological state at the time of the killings should be taken into account in deciding her sentence. As the verdict was read out she remained still but then began sobbing.