It was June 6, 2012 at 2:40 a.m. A man contacted service 100. He explained that Cathy, his wife, was not well because she had a hemorrhage. The latter explains to the operator that she is not pregnant but that she lost like a pocket while she was in the toilet. When paramedics arrived, they noticed numerous bloodstains.
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The patient is weak. She is taken to the Dinant Hospital Center where the doctor detects a “delivery hemorrhage”, which implies that the patient has recently given birth. Cathy, who then already had two daughters, denied having been pregnant and having given birth, so much so that the doctor informed the prosecution.
Fluctuating declarations
Heard for the first time in the morning, Cathy remains in her denials. An hour later, she returned to her statements, which she did numerous times during the investigation as discoveries were made. She admits that a month ago, she suspected she was pregnant but she didn’t feel anything moving in her stomach. She says she didn’t tell anyone about it and that she planned to give birth at home and carry her baby in the “baby box” set up in Antwerp for mothers who wish to abandon their newborns. According to her, she gave birth on the toilet but did not see the fetus because she did not dare to look.
Also heard, the husband said he learned everything from the doctor at the hospital. In the evening, heard again, Cathy becomes more precise. She acknowledges that her baby – a girl – was alive and well at birth, although she did not cry. She detected movements of the thorax. She wanted to give him a bottle for her youngest daughter, then aged 15 months, but the newborn refused the bottle. Cathy dozed off briefly. And, she said, when she woke up, her baby was dead. She then decided to go and hide the little corpse in the woods.
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All-out excavations
On site, however, investigators only found a white bag containing blood. The place is scrutinized. No baby. Cathy is re-questioned. His statements still fluctuate. According to her, she gave birth alone and placed her live baby in a blue PMC bag because she had heard her husband coming home. She would have placed the blue bag under the bed in order to hide the birth from her husband. To hear him say it, he would have suffocated in that plastic bag.
She then points to a trash can near the Houdremont Youth Club: she allegedly left the blue PMC bag there with the baby. The excavations were equally unsuccessful. Thirty people will go so far as to search the Intradel waste treatment center in Herstal to find the bag. Always in vain.
A breakthrough seven years later
The years go by. Cathy and her husband are sticking to their guns. In 2019, the judge decided to carry out a new examination of the white bag with the blood. He reveals that the husband is indeed the father. The judge places microphones in the couple’s car. In a conversation, the investigators hear that they are discussing the famous white bag. The couple worries that the husband’s fingerprints could be found there. Confronted with this element, the husband then recognizes that it was he who left the bag in the woods containing the blood clots that he had sponged up in the bathroom. Cathy denies it: she doesn’t say she understands why her husband is accusing himself.
The computer equipment seized from the couple’s home in 2012 is being re-examined. It appears that, a few hours before Cathy’s admission to the hospital, research was carried out on childbirth from a medical point of view (placental abruption) and legal (abandonment or adoption of a child or “boxes”). to baby”).
The investigation ends. The public prosecutor’s office requests the referral to court of Cathy but not of her husband. In November 2022, the council chamber granted the suspension of the sentence to Cathy, thus sparing her any trial. But the prosecution appealed and, on February 13, 2023, the Liège indictment chamber referred Cathy alone to the Namur assizes for infanticide.
This woman, described as very maternal with the children but who, say those close to her, never confides, will be defended by Me Jean-Philippe Mainz. The trial is expected to last throughout the week.
