German woman suspected of killing five of her babies

A woman killed her five infants shortly after giving birth in secret at home and in the woods because each time she got pregnant she worried her husband would leave her if she had any more children, authorities say.
The woman, 28, who has been arrested on five counts of manslaughter, made a "comprehensive confession" to the killings after turning herself in as a six-year investigation closed in on her, said Ulrike Stahlmann-Liebelt, the head prosecutor in Flensburg, on Germany's border with Denmark.
Stahlmann-Liebelt said the woman, whose name was not released in accordance with German privacy laws, has two living children, aged eight and 10. But then in 2006 she began hiding her pregnancies, staying away from doctors and hospitals and killing the infants after giving birth to two at home and three in the woods, she said.
"She had the impression her husband would leave her if she had any more children, and that's why she didn't tell anyone she was pregnant, including her husband," Stahlmann-Liebelt said.
"She has said that the family lived at a certain level of prosperity, that it was clear her husband did not want any more children, and that one reason was to preserve this standard, and she feared that might be endangered if another child were there."
The husband has told police he knew nothing about the pregnancies, Stahlmann-Liebelt said, and it wasn't entirely clear how the woman managed to keep them secret.
Stahlmann-Liebelt said there have been other cases when woman's pregnancy can go unnoticed by their partners and others.
Police found the first infant's body dumped in a paper sorting station in 2006 about 15 kilometres away from the town of Husum, where the woman lived. The second was found in a parking area off a regional highway, also about the same distance from Husum but in a different direction, in 2007.
After reading news reports that DNA results had confirmed the two children had the same parents, the woman then decided not to dispose the other bodies in public places, police official Dirk Czarnetzki said.
She hid the next three infants - whose existence authorities were unaware of until the woman's confession - in boxes in the basement of the building where she lived.
After finding the first two babies, authorities were able to narrow down the likelihood that the parents came from the area around Husum, a town on the North Sea coast.
In the course of the investigation they took hundreds of DNA tests from women in the area over time and took a sample from the woman on Tuesday, Czarnetzki said at a televised news conference. A short time after - before the sample had been processed - the woman turned herself in and confessed, he said.