Gertraud Arzberger

Victims

4 CONVICTIONS FOR MURDER, all four newborn children, by jury verdict on a guilty plea. The classification was the contested point: the jury rejected the lesser offence of killing at birth, which would have carried at most five years, and the Supreme Court upheld the life sentence

Years active

2000 - 2005

Location

Graz, Austria

Method

Not established

Status

Arrested in June 2005 after the remains of two infants were found in a freezer in the cellar of her home in Graz and two more in the garden. She admitted killing four newborn children between 2000 and 2005, each shortly after a concealed birth. At the Graz Landesgericht on March 31, 2006 the jury CONVICTED HER OF MURDER on all four counts, REJECTING THE LESSER CHARGE OF KILLING AT BIRTH under section 79 of the Austrian criminal code, which carries a maximum of five years; the distinction turned on whether she had acted under the influence of the birth itself. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. The defence appealed the classification and the sentence and the OBERSTER GERICHTSHOF CONFIRMED THE LIFE SENTENCE IN 2006. She was also ordered into a forensic-psychiatric institution alongside the sentence. Under Austrian law a life sentence may be reviewed for conditional release after fifteen years, from 2021; no release has been reported.

Arzberger was born in 1972 and lived in Graz, Austria. Between 2000 and 2005 she gave birth four times, concealing the pregnancies, and killed each baby at or shortly after birth. She put two of the bodies in a freezer in the flat and encased the other two in buckets filled with concrete.

The bodies were found in 2005. She told investigators she had acted out of despair at being unable to pay her bills and support the children.

She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment on March 31, 2006.

The case belongs with Sabine Hilschenz and Megan Huntsman in this archive: repeated concealed pregnancies over several years in an ordinary flat, the bodies kept on the premises, and nobody around her aware of any of it. In all three the concealment lasted years and ended by accident.