Before she killed her children, Geneviève Lhermitte mailed two letters. It was Wednesday, February 28, 2007, the day her husband, Bouchaïb Moqadem, was due home from a visit to his family in Morocco. That morning she took her eldest, Yasmine, to a dermatology appointment. One envelope held jewelry for her sisters. The other went to a friend named Valérie, and 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, according to the indictment, she went into a 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; Moqadem regarded him as an adoptive father. When the couple married 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. 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.
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. 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, and Le Figaro reported that the expert evidence was itself in dispute. Her own psychiatrist testified about two letters she had written before the trial in which she spoke of suicide, and she told the court more than once that she had seen no other way out.
On December 19, 2008, the jury convicted her and the court found no mitigating circumstances. 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 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. A chamber of the court rejected the complaint in May 2015; in September a panel of five judges sent it to the Grand Chamber. On November 29, 2016, in Lhermitte v. Belgium, the Grand Chamber found no violation, holding that the proceedings as a whole had allowed her to understand why she was convicted.
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.