On May 30, 2005, a neighbor went down to the shared cellar of an apartment building in Graz, Austria, to fetch ice cream for his children and found, beneath the frozen meat and vegetables in the residents' chest freezer, two newborn babies wrapped in plastic. Police with sniffer dogs found two more on the premises. By one account one was sealed in a concrete-filled bucket in a garden shed and the other hidden behind a pile of rubbish; others describe both encased in concrete. They were the children of Gertraud Arzberger, a thirty-two-year-old bookkeeper whom neighbors knew as a hard worker with a tidy flat and a neat yard. She and her partner of about eight years, Johannes Genser, a carpenter, were arrested on June 2.
Arzberger, born in 1972, had given birth four times between 2000 and 2005, each time concealing the pregnancy. She said she had delivered each child alone in the bathtub and could not remember what she did afterward. She told investigators she had acted out of despair over money, and out of fear that a child would drive Genser away. Post-mortems indicated that the two infants in the freezer were still alive when they were wrapped in plastic bags and put inside. Genser was the father of at least three of the children.
Prosecutors charged five killings, on the word of neighbors who said her swollen belly had been obvious more than once, but no fifth body was found and she denied a fifth child. She admitted killing four. "I'm sorry, I can't make everything all right again," she told the court before the verdicts. The trial turned on what to call what she had done. Austrian law separates murder from killing at birth under section 79 of the criminal code, an offense with a maximum of five years, and the difference rests on whether the mother acted under the influence of the birth itself; four births across five years, each hidden, with the bodies kept at home, did not fit it. On March 31, 2006, the Graz regional court convicted her of murder and sentenced her to life imprisonment, with commitment to a forensic-psychiatric institution. Most reports say she was convicted on three counts, because experts could not rule out that one of the babies had been stillborn; some give four. The prosecutor, Winklhofer, called her a murderer who had killed four babies in a brutal and gruesome fashion.
Genser was convicted as an accessory and sentenced to fifteen years. He always said he never noticed she was pregnant. What he admitted was telling her that if she became pregnant she would have to leave, and prosecutors called it implausible that he had not known. His son, who had worked beside Arzberger in the family's carpentry shop through the years of the pregnancies, said he had noticed nothing, and his family and a 2011 Austrian television documentary have called his conviction a miscarriage of justice. Leaving court in handcuffs, he asked the judge, "Can I still offer her my hand?" The judge said no.
The life sentence became reviewable for conditional release in 2021; no release had been reported by 2026. Cases of repeated concealed pregnancies over several years, with the bodies kept at home, have surfaced elsewhere, among them Sabine Hilschenz in Germany and Megan Huntsman in Utah. In each the concealment lasted years and ended by accident.