A 28-year-old woman has been sent to prison for life by a court in Germany, after she killed five of her six children in an extreme and shocking act of revenge against her ex-husband.
Judge Jochen Koetter described the case as a “tragedy,” and the court in the western town of Solingen concluded that the woman’s guilt was so “grave,” it would be “inappropriate” to grant her the usual right of parole after serving 15 years.
Identified in German media only as Christiane K., the woman was found guilty of murdering five of her children, aged between one and eight, as part of a bizarre revenge campaign against her ex-husband. Their bodies were found by the police in her apartment on the same day they were killed, in early September 2020. The horrific discovery caused shockwaves across Germany.
At her trial, the court heard the mother had sedated the children with a powerful drug before drowning them in a bathtub one by one and then putting them in their beds.
Her only surviving child, an 11-year-old boy, was at school on the day in question. He later testified to the police that his mother had sought to convince him to jump in front of a train with her. She attempted to take her own life in this manner after the murders, but survived.
According to the court, the killings were motivated by a “mixture of disappointment, anger, and desperation.” The trial heard that Christiane K’s “life plan” of having a “large family” had been shattered when her husband – the father of the four youngest children – left her for another woman, and that she had decided to act after seeing a photo of him with his new partner. Prior to killing her children, she sent text messages to her former spouse, telling him he would never see his offspring again.
Christiane K. had denied all the charges, insisting that a stranger had broken into her apartment, handcuffed her, forced her to send messages to her ex-husband, and killed her children. However, the court found her version of events to be implausible.
A psychiatric assessment requested by the court found the accused was fully aware of her actions and not suffering from any serious mental disorders, despite having a “narcissistic personality structure.” According to the court, she was living in an imaginary world that had been destroyed after its “façade” fell. After that, even her own children “lost their function” in her eyes.
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