Gertraud Arzberger was a bookkeeper in her early thirties when the bodies of four newborn children were found in Gösting, a green, village-like district of Graz, Austria, at the end of May and the start of June 2005. She had carried and delivered the children in secret. She admitted giving birth to them but said she could not remember what happened afterward.
At a jury trial in Graz in March 2006 she was convicted of murdering three of the children and sentenced to life imprisonment. Her partner, Johannes Genser, the father of at least three of them, was convicted as an accessory and sentenced to 15 years, although he insisted he had never noticed that she was pregnant. The case raised a question that Austrian courts and psychiatrists went on arguing about for years: whether a woman who hid four births could be treated under the milder law for mothers who kill a child at birth, and whether a man living with her could have failed to see what was happening.
Austrian newspapers and magazines name the couple only as Gertraud A. and Johannes G., or Hannes G. The Associated Press and United Press International printed their full names when the verdict was given.
She grew up in Puchegg, near Vorau, in the hill country of eastern Styria. Her parents ran a large farm there, and the family was comfortably off. Villagers who spoke to profil in 2005 remembered a well-behaved girl who was always cheerful, and a school friend described a popular classmate who loved dancing, played the guitar and sang on a school ski trip. In an entry in the friend's autograph album, dated May 1988, when she was 15, she listed handball and volleyball as her sports and Europe, Bilgeri and the Pet Shop Boys as her favorite music. Among her hobbies were reading, shopping in town and "being happy." Her dream job, she wrote, was "to become smarter."
After primary and lower secondary school she went to a commercial academy but left without finishing, having struggled with Italian and accounting, and trained instead as an office clerk. profil reported in 2010 that when she was 11 her grandmother, who had cancer, lay ill in the family's living room for years before she died, and connected this with a fear of doctors that stayed with her: her first gynecological examination, the magazine wrote, took place after she entered prison.
In her later years in Graz she rarely went home, though she was still registered as living at the farm. Her parents, according to profil, knew nothing about her partner. When she showed them pictures from a trip to Los Angeles that she had won while working at a filling station, she had taken out the photographs in which he appeared.
Genser, about six years older than she was, had trained in his father's carpentry workshop and had his master's certificate by the age of 20, along with a wife, children and a house of his own. profil reported in 2010 that the two met at a window company in Graz in which he had bought a stake as managing director in 1995 and where she worked as the bookkeeper; when the business ran into financial trouble they worked side by side to save it, and in 1998 they moved in together. NEWS magazine gave a different sequence, saying she began working at his carpentry business in 1999 and that he left his wife in 2000 to move in with her.
He already had children from his marriage and did not want more. NEWS reported that he had forbidden her to have children. In June 2005 profil reported that he was registered as unemployed and was said to be doing informal work on the side to support his family, and that money in the household was tight.
The couple had lived in Gösting for about five years and had been together for about eight. Neighbors knew them as quiet people who kept to themselves and offered little more than a greeting. The Associated Press later reported that neighbors described her as a hard worker.
On May 30, 2005, the criminal police were called in Gösting, and over the following days four newborn children were found dead. RTÉ News reported on June 3 that a 32-year-old woman and her 38-year-old boyfriend had been arrested on suspicion of murder. Police said the children had died shortly after birth and that the causes of death were unclear.
Werner Jud, who led the investigation for the Graz police, told profil that there might be further victims. None were reported. By early June both were in pretrial custody on suspicion of murder. Reporters and camera crews from Austria, Slovenia and Germany gathered in Gösting, and the story reached international broadcasters.
Arzberger told the police that she did not know what had happened. To investigators she admitted only that she had given birth to the children. She spoke of a fear for her very existence, and investigators told profil they believed Genser had not wanted another child under any circumstances and might have put her under pressure. According to the Associated Press, she told investigators that she had acted out of despair over unpaid bills and out of fear that children would drive her partner away. Genser denied knowing that she had ever been pregnant.
Those who knew her struggled to make sense of it. Acquaintances told profil she was tall and attractive and not someone who could easily hide a pregnancy. Villagers in Puchegg said with one voice that she could not have done such a thing, or at least not of her own accord.
Prosecutors charged her with killing five infants. The fifth rested on neighbors who testified that they had seen her pregnant one more time; no fifth body was found, and she denied that there had been a fifth child. She pleaded guilty to four counts. Genser was charged as an accessory and maintained his innocence. Forensic examination could not establish how two of the children had died.
The case was heard at the Graz regional court in March 2006 before a jury of eight lay people, with Karl Buchgraber presiding. The state prosecutor, Johannes Winklhofer, asked for a stiff sentence, called her a murderer and argued that Genser had known what was going on. Genser's lawyer called the case against his client "pure fiction." Neighbors testified that her swollen belly had been plain to see.
The court's psychiatric expert, Friedrich Rous, told the court that diminished responsibility was possible at the time of the first death, but that after it a process of learning had set in. On Genser's claim, he said everyday experience made it hard to imagine that a partner in an intact relationship could miss four pregnancies over more than three years. Before the verdict Arzberger addressed the court. "I'm sorry I can't make everything all right again," she said, as United Press International translated her words.
The jury convicted her of three counts of murder, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Associated Press reported the verdict on March 31, 2006, and explained that she was convicted on three counts rather than four because experts could not say whether one of the children had been stillborn. profil, writing in 2010, described the jury's reasoning differently: the jurors found that she had been in an exceptional state of mind at the first death, an offense for which the law provides one to five years, and that the other three deaths were intentional murders.
Genser was convicted as an accessory to the murders and sentenced to 15 years. The jurors did not believe his account that he had noticed nothing. As he was led from the courtroom in handcuffs, he asked the judge whether he might propose marriage to Arzberger. The judge said no.
Austrian law punishes a mother who kills her child during or just after birth far more lightly than murder. profil noted in 2005 that the provision allows one to five years in prison and that many women sentenced under it receive suspended terms, because such killings are usually committed by very young women who are overwhelmed and act in panic. The Austrian criminal code of 1803 was the first to treat a killing after birth as a privileged offense, profil reported in 2010, and most countries punish it less harshly than murder today. Germany limited its own special rule to children born outside marriage and removed it from its criminal code in 1998. In Arzberger's case the jury applied the milder view to the first death only.
Her father later decided to take her case to the public, backed by new psychiatric opinions obtained by her lawyers. Claudia Klier, a specialist in neonaticide at the university clinic for child and adolescent neuropsychiatry in Vienna, was dismayed by what she saw in the Graz courtroom. She contacted Matthias Lammel, a German forensic psychiatrist who had worked on the major infant-killing cases in Germany, and he examined first Arzberger and then Genser.
Lammel called Rous's conclusions absurd and wrong and dismissed the idea of a learning process as "housewife psychology." In his view she should have been sentenced under the special provision for all four deaths. He also rejected the case against Genser, saying the jury had decided on common sense where a thorough psychiatric report should have corrected it, and told profil that Genser would not be in prison in Germany.
Andreas Berchtold, her lawyer, and Gerald Ruhri, who represented Genser, used Lammel's report to apply for the case to be reopened. Prosecutors opposed the application, arguing that a privately commissioned report was not evidence. The court then appointed a new psychiatrist, Reinhard Haller. His wording was gentler, but he too concluded that an exceptional emotional state was possible in all four deaths. Haller found no sign that she had been in thrall to her partner; he did find problematic personality traits in her and concluded that the acts came from her own thoughts and feelings rather than from him.
In January 2010 the Graz regional court ruled that there were no new findings, a conclusion Berchtold called simply wrong. The higher regional court rejected the lawyers' appeal. In October 2010 profil reported that the lawyers planned one last step: asking the Generalprokuratur, the office of the prosecutor general, to bring a plea of nullity for the preservation of the law. NEWS magazine later reported that the couple had spent years seeking a retrial without success.
In 2010 Arzberger was held at the women's prison in Schwarzau, Lower Austria. The Justice Ministry refused profil's request to interview her, and her father, who rose at four in the morning twice a week to drive to see her, was allowed to see her only alone. Over the years he asked her why, and her answer was always the same: she did not know.
He came back from one visit with a handwritten page from her. She wrote that the time of her arrest and trial was as if blown away, that she had been given a great deal of medication and needed a long time to come off it, and that in prison she had begun therapy. At some point she could smell the air again, she wrote; feelings, thoughts and smells returned, as if a balloon around her had been pricked. She had somehow learned to live with having killed her children, she wrote, but she could not live with the word murder. Her father said there was hardly a room in the prison she had not painted.
Genser served his sentence at Karlau prison in Graz, where NEWS reported that he worked as a carpenter. The couple stayed together. They wrote letters and spoke often by phone, and with official permission he was taken every four to six weeks to Schwarzau, about 134 kilometers away, to spend several hours with her in a private visiting room. His mother told NEWS that he paid about 190 euros for each visit, with help from the family. Prison doctors and psychologists advised the couple to use contraception, and any child she bore in prison would have been taken from her at birth. "I will never leave Gerti, I will always love her, no matter what comes," he told the magazine.
Both families stood by the couple. Her relatives told NEWS that she was not a murderer but had been under the influence of a severe psychiatric disorder when she killed her children, and that Genser had known nothing. Genser's mother told profil that she had learned of the case from the news and had asked herself how a man could fail to notice such a thing, before discovering that the man was her own son. She said he would never have allowed the children to be killed and that she, too, blamed herself: one word or one sign, she said, and none of it would have happened. profil reported in 2010 that Genser still could not come to terms with serving a sentence for the murder of his own children.
The number of children. Four bodies were found. Prosecutors charged a fifth killing on the testimony of neighbors, but no body was found, Arzberger denied a fifth child, and the charge did not lead to a conviction. profil wrote in 2005 that there might have been more than four children; no further bodies were reported.
The fourth death. She was convicted of three murders, not four. The Associated Press attributed this to the possibility that one child was stillborn; profil described the jury as treating the first death as committed in an exceptional state of mind. The two accounts have never been reconciled.
Her state of mind. The court's expert saw diminished responsibility as possible only for the first death. Two later experts, one privately commissioned and one appointed by the court, considered an exceptional state possible for all four. The courts declined to reopen the case.
Genser's knowledge. He was convicted on the basis that he knew of the pregnancies. He, his mother and her relatives have all maintained that he did not, and the German psychiatrist Matthias Lammel argued that he should not have been convicted. The conviction stood.
The start of the relationship. profil dated their move in together to 1998; NEWS put it in 2000.
1973: Gertraud Arzberger is born, according to profil; she grows up on her parents' farm in Puchegg, near Vorau, eastern Styria.
May 1988: aged 15, she writes an entry in a school friend's album.
1995: Johannes Genser buys a stake in a Graz window company where she later works as bookkeeper (profil).
1998 or 2000: the couple move in together (profil and NEWS differ).
Before May 2005: four children are born in secret.
May 30 to early June 2005: in Graz-Gösting, four newborn children are found dead; Arzberger and Genser are arrested and held on suspicion of murder.
March 2006: jury trial at the Graz regional court.
March 31, 2006: the verdict is reported; she is convicted of three murders and sentenced to life, and Genser receives 15 years as an accessory.
Before January 2010: defense lawyers apply to reopen the case on the strength of new psychiatric reports.
January 2010: the Graz regional court finds no new findings and rejects reopening.
By October 2010: the higher regional court rejects the appeal; the lawyers plan to approach the prosecutor general.
2010: she is held at Schwarzau women's prison; Genser at Karlau prison in Graz.