Before she killed her children, Geneviève Lhermitte left letters. The day before, she delivered one to her psychiatrist's practice. On Wednesday, February 28, 2007, the day her husband, Bouchaïb Moqadem, was due home from a visit to his family in Morocco, she took her eldest, Yasmine, to a dermatology appointment. In the letterbox of her friend and confidante Valérie she left a bag of jewelry, meant, by the indictment's account, for her sisters, and a final letter. In it she called Dr. Michel Schaar, the man who shared the family's house in Nivelles, a rotten bastard who had stolen the intimacy between her, her husband and their children, and she accused her husband of being deaf and blind to it. Then she went into a department store and slipped two knives into her bag.
What followed is known mostly from her own account to investigators. The children were watching Spy Kids 3 when she called the youngest girl, Mina, away from the others. She tried to strangle her, and when the child cried out in pain she cut her throat, talking to her softly and apologizing as she did it. Mehdi, three, her only son, was next; she tried again to strangle and again could not, cut his throat, and washed the knife in the bathroom sink. She told Myriam there was a surprise for her in the office, sat her in a chair with a blue handkerchief over her eyes, struck her on the head with a marble slab and cut her throat. Nora, said to be Schaar's favorite, was told to sit and was killed from behind. With Nora's blood Lhermitte wrote JUD on the bathroom mirror; she said later that she had meant to write Judas.
Yasmine, fourteen, was last. She was called to the office for a surprise, as Myriam had been, and when her mother came at her from behind she dropped to the floor and dodged the blade. She was stabbed repeatedly in the struggle before her mother stabbed her in the back and cut her throat. Lhermitte then fell on the knife. When she understood the wound would not kill her, she wrote "Call the police" on the door in red marker and phoned the emergency services. Investigators found the five children laid in their beds, some with stuffed animals in their arms. Belgian press accounts give the girls' ages as fourteen, twelve, nine and seven.
The household had been strange from the start. Lhermitte was born in Brussels in 1966, the daughter of Michel Lhermitte, a businessman, and Marina Schoevaert, a nurse, and the eldest of three sisters. In 1988 or 1989, at the adult teacher-training institute in Uccle where she took a diploma in French and history in 1991, she met Moqadem, a mathematics and physics student who never finished his degree. Schaar, a physician, had befriended Moqadem's family in Morocco in the 1980s and had taken the young man in when he came to Belgium in 1983, giving him a home and paying for his studies; he was fifteen years older, and Moqadem regarded him as an adoptive father. When the couple married, on September 22, 1990, they moved into Schaar's apartment. She did not object, by her later account, because she assumed it was temporary.
It was not. Schaar bought a house for himself and the couple after Yasmine was born, hired Moqadem in 1996 as a part-time filing assistant in his practice and full-time in 1998, and paid for most of what the family had, the vacations, the repairs, a monthly allowance, life insurance on each of them. Lhermitte, who had begun teaching in 1991, took leave from June 1995 to August 1996 for postpartum depression after Nora's birth, by the indictment as Belgian accounts summarize it. The European Court's summary of the case dates the depression earlier, to 1992 and the birth of her first child, when she left teaching and Schaar, who was her general practitioner, certified her unfit for work. Myriam and Mina followed, and in 2000 the family moved to Nivelles, south of Brussels, into a house whose mortgage Schaar paid and whose second floor he occupied. Moqadem was away for long hours and made several trips a year to his family in Marrakech, each lasting from a week to a month. Mehdi was born; the next year Schaar suggested she see a psychiatrist, and from 2005 she was treated by Dr. Diderick Veldekens, who prescribed an antidepressant, sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication.
She was hospitalized, then placed under an arrest warrant, charged with the five killings and held in the psychiatric wing of Berkendael prison in Brussels. Moqadem learned what had happened when he landed at Zaventem airport. In her first police interview she said she had acted in a fit of despair over her family's dependence on Schaar. The investigating judge had her examined by two psychologists and by a panel of three psychiatrists, who reported in the autumn of 2007. The investigating file ran to about 1,900 pages.
The trial opened in December 2008 before the Assize Court of Walloon Brabant in Nivelles, with a jury of eight women and four men. She had confessed, so the trial was about why. The prosecutor, Pierre Rans, opened by describing what the emergency crews found in the house and asked for thirty years. Her lawyers, Daniel Spreutels and Xavier Magnée, argued that she had been ill for years and poorly treated. The psychiatric experts described what they called an altruistic suicide. Then Veldekens, testifying, revealed for the first time two letters she had written to him in which she spoke of suicide. The presiding judge sent the same three psychiatrists back to weigh them, and near the end of the ten-day hearing they returned unanimous: at the time of the killings she had been suffering from a severe mental disturbance that made her incapable of controlling her actions. The experts themselves, the European Court of Human Rights later noted, played down the weight of that finding. She told the court more than once that she had seen no other way out.
On December 19, 2008, the jury answered yes to the questions of guilt, finding her guilty of premeditated intentional homicide, and no to the question of whether she was mentally ill at present. It gave no reasons for parting from the experts. The court, three judges sitting with the jury, found no mitigating circumstances, citing her resolve and the cold-blooded manner in which she had carried out the killings. It gave her life, more than the prosecution had asked for. Afterward she said, in words reported by L'Avenir, that she could not care less about her sentence, and that she would always carry the pain of feeling alive.
Her appeal to the Court of Cassation, filed on January 8, 2009, was dismissed; that court held that her cold-blooded manner and her determination had been the Assize Court's reason for finding her responsible. In June 2009 her lawyers took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing under Article 6 of the Convention that she had been convicted on a verdict that gave no reasons, and that nothing explained why the jury had rejected the psychiatrists. A chamber of the court found no violation by four votes to three in May 2015. That September a panel of five judges sent the case to the Grand Chamber, which heard it on January 27, 2016, and on November 29, 2016, in Lhermitte v. Belgium, ruled ten to seven that there had been no violation: the proceedings as a whole had allowed her to understand why she was convicted. Seven judges, among them the court's president, Guido Raimondi, dissented.
On April 18, 2019, the sentence-enforcement court in Brussels approved a plan for her conditional release to a closed psychiatric center, and in May she left the prison at Forest-Berkendael. She asked for euthanasia on the ground of unbearable psychological suffering, which Belgian law has allowed since 2002, and on February 28, 2023, sixteen years to the day after the killings, she died at the Léonard de Vinci hospital in Montigny-le-Tilleul. She was fifty-six. Her lawyer confirmed the death to RTBF. Schaar told reporters that he would bear her a grudge for the rest of his life for what she had done to the children. Joachim Lafosse's 2012 film À perdre la raison, released in English as Our Children, was loosely based on the case.
1966: Geneviève Lhermitte is born in Brussels.
September 22, 1990: she marries Bouchaïb Moqadem, and they move into Dr. Michel Schaar's apartment.
1991: she takes a diploma in French and history and begins teaching.
2000: the family moves to Nivelles, into a house whose mortgage Schaar pays.
2005: she begins treatment with the psychiatrist Dr. Diderick Veldekens.
February 28, 2007: she kills her five children, Yasmine, Nora, Myriam, Mina and Mehdi, at the family house in Nivelles.
December 2008: her trial opens before the Assize Court of Walloon Brabant.
December 19, 2008: the jury finds her guilty of premeditated intentional homicide, and she is sentenced to life.
January 8, 2009: she appeals to the Court of Cassation, which dismisses the appeal.
June 2009: her lawyers take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
May 2015: a chamber of the court finds no violation by four votes to three.
November 29, 2016: the Grand Chamber, in Lhermitte v. Belgium, rules ten to seven that there was no violation.
April 18, 2019: the sentence-enforcement court approves her conditional release to a closed psychiatric center; she leaves prison in May.
February 28, 2023: having asked for euthanasia, she dies at the Léonard de Vinci hospital in Montigny-le-Tilleul, aged fifty-six.