Lhermitte was born in 1966 and lived at Nivelles, in Belgium, with her husband and their five children, aged three to fourteen.
On February 28, 2007 she killed all five with a kitchen knife, one after another, and then attempted to take her own life. She telephoned the emergency services herself.
Her defence was that she had been severely mentally ill for years and inadequately treated, and there was extensive psychiatric evidence about her deterioration and about the household. The jury rejected the defence and she was convicted, and on December 19, 2008 sentenced to life imprisonment.
She took her case to the European Court of Human Rights, which in Lhermitte v. Belgium held that the absence of reasons from a Belgian jury verdict had not, in her case, denied her a fair trial. The judgment is cited in European law on the reasoning of jury decisions.
In February 2023, sixteen years to the month after the killings, she was granted euthanasia under Belgian law on the ground of unbearable psychological suffering, and died. Belgium has permitted euthanasia for psychiatric suffering since 2002, and the decision was publicly argued about at the time.
This is a single act, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification. She was granted euthanasia in Belgium in February 2023 and died.