On January 29, 2022 nine-year-old Georgina Daskalaki died at the Children's Hospital in Athens after what was recorded as a cardiac arrest. She had been paralyzed from the neck down for ten months, since convulsions during a stay at the Karamandaneio children's hospital in Patras, and her death might have been filed as the end of a long illness. This time a toxicology screen was run. It found ketamine, an anesthetic used in veterinary surgery and in some treatments for depression, which no one had prescribed her. Georgina was the third of Roula Pispirigou's daughters to die in less than three years, and the first whose death anyone questioned.
Pispirigou was born in Patras on August 5, 1989 and grew up there. She studied nursing without finishing 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 edema and a heart defect of the sinus node, and reported as heart failure. Neither death was treated as suspicious at the time.
The Athens prosecutor's office opened an inquiry 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 paralyzed, 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 defense request for full genetic testing was refused, also unanimously. The prosecutor was Evangelia Spyridonidou, whose proposal the court adopted in full. 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, and neither conviction is final. The appeal against the Georgina verdict 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 took over after Kougias's death, needed time with a file of more than 4,500 pages. It was postponed again that January to September 18, 2026. She arrived that morning leaning on a cane; her lawyer had said months earlier that she had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that affected her mobility. The court adjourned once more, to April 2, 2027. Her appeal against the 2025 convictions for Malena and Iris came up on February 20, 2026 and was put back to December 4, 2026 because her lawyer could not attend. Pantazi's case is that the deaths were medical error, and that the same medical evidence certified all three as natural in the first place.