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Celine Lesage, a thirty-eight year old woman living in France, was on trial today discussing six counts of aggravated newborn homicide. If convicted, the baby-killer woman faces life in prison.
Lesage was arrested in 2007 after her partner reported her to authorities after the bodies of six newborn babies were found wrapped in plastic in the woman’s basement. During questioning, Lesage acknowledged what she had done and claimed that the children were not stillborn. She admitted to killing them.
The woman’s ex-husband was father to four of the children and a new partner had fathered the other two. Prosecution states that two of the six children were strangled and the other four were suffocated. Although both previous partners state that they were aware of the woman’s pregnancies, both men claim that they knew nothing about the death of the children until the bodies were found in 2007. There are currently no pending charges against either of the woman’s exes.
According to prosecution, the woman delivered the children between 2000 and 2007 and after killing them, deposited them into plastic bags along with dirty clothing and stored them in her basement. Prosecutor Michel Garrandaux states:
“Her attitude was wholly ambivalent. On the one hand, she expressed her desire to have children, and then she refused to keep them.”
However, Lesage’s lawyer is apparently pulling the mental illness card:
“The facts of the case are not in dispute, but there is medical and psychological evidence to consider … My client believes she is responsible, but not guilty.”
Be that as it may, since there is an overwhelming amount of evidence alluding to the fact that Lesage is clearly a mentally disturbed individual, this is still a woman that deserves to go to jail for the rest of her life even in spite of that fact.
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Obviously she’s guilty. She does admit it.
What I don’t understand is that the exes didn’t notice anything. If they knew that she was pregnant, why did they never ask about the babies.
Let’s assume that when it happened the first time that she just said she lost the child. Ok. It would be odd if no medical personal was involved (e.g. in trying to save the baby) but the first time she might be convincing.
But the second time, wouldn’t a caring partner and soon-to-be parent make sure that medical professionals are involved? I mean she lost her first child, so there might be a risk that she’ll lose the second as well.
How can a partner not question the disappearance of 4 (or in the second guy’s case 2) babies?
I just don’t get it. SHOULDN’T they have known something?
I was wondering about that too. I’m pretty sure my husband would notice if I suddenly wasn’t pregnant anymore after 9 months but there was no baby.
She said they weren’t stillborn, so they probably went full term. Babies don’t evaporate.
Exactly. I feel like the 2 baby daddies are somewhat guilty, too. Especially the one who somehow didn’t notice that 4 of his babies disappeared but decided that continued propagation of the species, as it were, was still in everyone’s best interests.
I feel really sorry for her actually. The mental state she must have been in to do something like that is unthinkable.
Also, what about all of the people around her? OK, one time you notice that someone is preggo, then no baby. Second time same story? Let alone third, fourth, fifth and sixth.
Yes, she is mentally ill, but does that give her a pass to the mental ward instead of prison? I have no answers for people like this.
I have an answer—death penalty. The men knew good and well what happened to those poor babies! They just didn’t want to admit it and apparently didn’t mind living with a crazy baby killer and knocking her up repeatedly. They should be punished too because they’re just as mental/liable as the woman.
I agree with you. There’s no way in hell those men didn’t know. And there was a woman in Houston who drowned I think 4-5 of her children and the trial went on forever but in the end she got life in prison. Just because you’re mentally handicapped does not mean you are not responsible for your actions. She derserves to do the time for the crime. Period.
Oops Andrea Yates (woman in Houston) got a mental ward. But everything else I said still stands. I wish they had the death penalty in France. She should be killed. There needs to be a message sent round the world loud and clear that regardless of one’ mental state, you can still be put to death or get life in prison. People are getting a free pass. The more we coddle people, the more people will take advantage and the more crimes youw ill see like this.
Here’s the thing:
Crazy mothers who want to kill their children are not deterred by capital punishment.
BECAUSE THEY’RE CRAZY.
They don’t possess the mental stability to contemplate their actions in relation to potential punishments.
There is no point in killing Lesage. She will not serve as an example to anyone. You could hold the most horrifying public execution imaginable, and still, mentally ill women will continue to harm their children. Because they are mentally ill.
If these sort of tragedies are to be prevented, then there needs to be a more public focus on mental health. Someone knew this woman was not all there, yet no one reported it. And if they had, would the social services exist to come to her home and provide her with counselling? Have her committed before she was able to cause harm to others?
Probably not. We’d far rather pour money into the corrections system to take care of the problem after the fact than to find ways to stop the problem from occurring in the first place.
I agree with what you’re saying as far as it applies to crazy women.
Andrea Yates, for example, asked for help all along. Her husband knew how unbalanced she was and at every turn he did things that harmed her mental health rather than doing what would help her. The people around her were destructive and drove her further into the insanity that led her to believe that she was saving her children’s souls by killing them when they were young. She was absolutely psychotic and the sane people around her should have helped her and her children.
I am still amazed that in the state of Texas a woman can go to jail for not stopping her abusive partner from also abusing her children but this man was treated like some kind of victim.
But this woman continued to murder her children and hide that from everybody. Over and over again. For years. Is that psychotic behavior? Was she out of touch with reality? It seems that she realized that she would be punished for what she was doing and so she hid it. That indicates a grasp of right and wrong. I’m sure she has mental health issues. But there’s a difference between a psychotic break and depression.
We can speculate all we want, but the courts will have to decide her mental state in the end. I imagine there are hoards of details that we don’t know.
(Though I find it very hard to believe that an entirely sane woman would want to continually get pregnant just to kill her newborns. I’m not sure what the logical motive would be behind that).
My mother had 7 still births before having me and my sister so it’s not actually that unlikely that these guys believed her when she said that she miscarried or that the babies were still born.
I mean we don’t know how involved these men were in the process of her being pregnant, and she would deliver the babies alone. If the police/courts have deicide not to charge them with anything who are we to judge that decision? It’s not as if any of us are in possession of all the facts of this case.
As for the woman, put her in the chair I say.
Nobody commits infanticide (in America anyway) without being very mentally screwed up. For the people who are advocating the death penalty – this occurred in France. The US is the only developed country in the world that still has the death penalty. And I do not agree with the idea of executing someone for a mental problem that they have no control over.
Yes, this is sickening. It’s one of the worst crimes imaginable. I do not understand how anyone could kill their own defenseless infant. But I do know that nobody in their right mind could ever do it. This woman clearly has some hella bad postpartum psychosis problems. She belongs in a mental institution, not the electric chair.
I think she belongs in prison. I think Andrea Yates belongs in a mental ward, where she is. Her insanity happened all in one go. She didn’t do it methodically.
This woman had six babies and killed them all, one after another in a period that spanned years.
She had time to seek help. If killing her children affected her at all, she also had motive.
This is a good case to why I believe in treating the mental illness and if they are pronounced “cured” then moving them to a prison to serve out the remainder of their sentence.
Totally agree with you.
This woman is SICK. And she probably ought to have her tubes tied immediately.
Ugh, reading this kind of thing just disgusts the hell out of me.
Maybe this only rubbed me the wrong way because I’m tired, but using a strikethrough on the phrase “baby killer” before amending with the word “woman” (in the second sentence) comes off as overly judgmental and rude to me. Of course, in cases of tragic crimes, it’s not unreasonable to feel and express anger, disgust, et cetera, but in a case like this, in which the woman may not be truly guilty because of mental disease/defect, it seems particularly cruel to toy with the wording that way. Yes, it describes what did, but using the term in that context is not very tactful, in light of the circumstances.
And it doesn’t help that that phrase is so often associated with the hostile tone of the anti-choice movement, either. (That’s not to say that this case has anything to do with wise decision-making.)
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Hey, idiot pro lifers, how do u feel about that?
A) Spare us the juvenile name calling, and
B) Please elaborate. The context of your question is somewhat vague.
Seriously. WTF are you even talking about? Grow up, and please realize that this is not a place, like Sydney said, to name call and pass unbelievably stupid and rash judgements. We discuss things in a normal, civil fashion. Please go somewhere else.
Anyone, that kills anyone outside of self-defense or an act of war, (which depending on how you look at it could be considered self-defense), is crazy. If you end another person’s life you are broken between the ears. Period. Now, with that being said if this was a man who had six dead newborns in his basement we wouldn’t even be debating whether or not his “sickness” gets him off the hook. Why is this human being treated differently than another?
I guess people just don’t want to think that a mother could do this without being mentally disturbed, but things like this happen all the time. There was a woman here who put her kid in the dryer and then you know set it going.
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