Véronique Courjault née Fièvre is a French citizen who was accused and found guilty of having killed three of her newborn children.[1] Her case has been referred to in the media as the Freezer Babies case.
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Véronique Courjault (born in 1968 in the French department of Maine-et-Loire) is the wife of engineer Jean-Louis Courjault (born in 1966). After their marriage in 1994, they were known to have had two sons born in 1995 and 1997.
After living in France, the couple moved to Seoul (South Korea) in 2002, while maintaining a home in the French city of Tours.
On July 23, 2006, Jean-Louis Courjault, returning to Seoul after vacationing in France, found two infant corpses in the family freezer. A few days later, DNA tests performed by South Korean authorities confirmed that the infants were those of the Courjaults.
On August 22, 2006, Jean-Louis and Véronique Courjault held a press-conference during which the couple contested the DNA results and called the media "a lynch mob" that was in conspiracy with commercial rivals of Jean-Louis Courjault.
The case was transferred to France where new DNA tests were ordered. On October 12, 2006, Véronique Courjault admitted to killing both infants that had been found as well as a third infant and then freezing their remains during the years 1999—while the couple still lived in France, then in 2002, and finally 2003 in South Korea.[2]
In January, 2009, Jean Louis Courjault was tried as an accomplice to the murders and found not guilty. He stated publicly that he had never been aware of his wife's pregnancies and that she had in fact kept them secret by wearing loose clothing and through a process referred to as denial of pregnancy.[3]
On June 18, 2009, Véronique Courjault was found guilty of having murdered her three infants by the French court and was sentenced to 8 years in prison. The sentence was not longer as premeditation could not be established.[4]
A large debate in the Francophone press emerged over the summer of 2009 concerning the basis for Courjault's denial of the three pregnancies and whether she had deliberately deceived her husband with the intention of murdering the infants. Swiss television (TSR) in Geneva aired an interview with American child psychiatrist Daniel Schechter, a specialist in the diagnosis and treatment of peripartum psychopathology.[5] Schechter described "denial of pregnancy" as a serious symptom of a psychiatric disturbance that can have several possible etiologies.[6]