Roula Pispirigou was born in Patras on August 5, 1989 and grew up there. She studied nursing without completing the degree, and refereed amateur football, which is where she met Manos Daskalakis, two years younger, whom she married. They had three daughters: Georgina, Malena and Iris. The marriage was unstable, and prosecutors would later argue that its instability was the motive: that she harmed the children at moments when her husband was leaving or had left, to bring him back.
Malena, aged three and a half, was in hospital in Patras in April 2019 being treated for leukaemia, a diagnosis the doctors regarded as treatable. On April 13, 2019 she died. Her death was certified as acute liver failure. Iris, six months old, died at home in her sleep in 2021; the cause was recorded as pulmonary oedema and a heart defect of the sinus node, and reported as heart failure. Neither death was treated as suspicious at the time.
Georgina, the eldest, was admitted to the Karamandaneio children’s hospital in Patras in 2021 after convulsions that left her tetraplegic. She was in and out of hospital for about ten months. On January 29, 2022 she died at the Children’s Hospital in Athens after what was recorded as a cardiac arrest. This time a toxicology screen was run, and it found ketamine, an anaesthetic used in veterinary surgery and in some treatments for depression, which had not been prescribed to her. On April 4, 2022 the Athens prosecutor’s office ordered an urgent preliminary investigation into all three deaths. Pispirigou was arrested on March 30, 2022 and charged with Georgina’s murder. When she was brought to court in Athens for arraignment, crowds shouted at her and tried to reach her through the police escort. The Greek press had by then named her the Medea of Patras, after the figure in myth who kills her sons when their father leaves her.
Her first trial, before the Mixed Jury Court of Athens, three judges and four jurors, concerned Georgina alone. The prosecution’s case was that she had tried to kill the child during an earlier hospital stay at the Karamandaneio, an attempt that failed and left the girl paralysed, and had then given her a fatal dose of ketamine in Athens. Pispirigou gave evidence across nine sessions. The prosecutor’s closing address ran twelve hours. On March 29, 2024 the court unanimously convicted her of the murder and attempted murder of her daughter and unanimously sentenced her to life. A defence request for full genetic testing was refused, also unanimously. Her lawyer at the time was Alexis Kougias, one of Greece’s best-known criminal advocates, who died before her second trial ended.
The Georgina conviction reopened the other two deaths. Re-examination of the medical evidence concluded that Malena and Iris had not died of liver failure and heart failure but had been asphyxiated. A second indictment charged her with both murders, and a second trial before the same court ran for about a year, roughly eighty sessions and some fifty witnesses, among them forensic examiners, doctors and nurses. The prosecutor, Vassiliki Dimopoulou, told the court she had killed the children to keep her marriage going, and that this showed a person who acted methodically and with forethought. The prosecutor also accused the forensic examiners who had certified the earlier deaths of negligence, saying their failures had let her go undetected for years; three of them and a pathologist were later investigated for perjury, and forensic reports were seized in an inquiry led by officials of the Justice Ministry in July 2025.
In her own evidence she said: I may not have been the best mother, but I am not my children’s murderer. On March 18, 2025 the judges and jurors unanimously found her guilty of both murders, committed, in the court’s language, in a calm mental state, and sentenced her to two further life terms. She asked for no mitigation. Holding photographs of the two girls, she told the court: Look at them, because they will haunt you. Manos Daskalakis, by then her former husband, was in the courtroom; his lawyer said the trial had dispelled any doubt about her guilt.
She has maintained throughout that she is innocent. Her appeal against the Georgina conviction was listed before the Mixed Jury Court of Appeal in Athens for May 5, 2025, and postponed to January 12, 2026 because her new lawyer, Vaso Pantazi, who had taken over after Kougias’s death, had been on the case for a month and the file ran past 4,500 pages. That hearing opened on January 12, 2026, with Pantazi arguing medical error and predicting the verdict would be overturned. Its outcome had not been reported in the sources available when this entry was written. An appeal against the 2025 convictions has also been announced.
This archive records three victims because two courts, each unanimous, convicted her of three murders. It also records that every one of those convictions is under appeal and that the defence case rests on the same medical evidence that certified all three deaths as natural in the first place. The case is not closed.