French woman faces 20-year jail sentence for strangling five of her babies
- Sylvie Horning is accused of murdering the children between 1990 and 2005, but investigations came to a standstill due to lack of evidence
- A chance incident that required her to supply her DNA after a fight with neighbours helped police identify the link between her and the babies’ bodies
French prosecutors on Thursday demanded a 20-year prison sentence for a woman charged with killing five of her newborn children, a crime that only came to light 15 years after the corpses were discovered.
Sylvie Horning, 55, was detained in November 2017 on suspicions she murdered the five children between 1990 and 2005.
Horning, the mother of three adult children, is thought to have hidden her pregnancies even from her partner, giving birth in secret and then strangling the newborns at her house in Wittelsheim in eastern France.
Nothing untoward was suspected until the discovery in 2003 of the bodies of four babies in rubbish bags in the nearby Galfingue forest.
I will accept all the sentences, even if it is 30 years in prison. If I was told ‘you die tonight’, I would accept it immediately
But the initial investigation was closed in 2009 after it failed to yield clues to the deaths.