A mother has gone on trial acused of killing two new-born babies she kept secret from her husband then hiding their bodies in a freezer.
In a case that has gripped France, Veronique Courjault faces a life sentence if found guilty of murder.
Judges in Tours will have to decide if she knew what she was doing or was in denial over her pregnancies.
She has already spent two and a half years on remand in prison and her family insist she is no danger to society.
In 2006 Courjault and her husband Jean-Louis were living in Seoul, South Korea, where he was working as an engineer and spent long periods away from home.
His wife and their two sons, aged nine and 11, had gone to France for a summer trip while Jean-Louis stayed behind.
He bought fish and went to put it in a downstairs freezer where he then discovered the bodies.
Horrified, he alerted the police and was later allowed to fly to France to be with his wife.
They held a press conference where they said they were baffled at how the babies had got there.
But weeks later DNA tests proved they were the parents and they were arrested.
Courjault confessed to police to hiding two pregnancies from her husband in 2002 and 2003, giving birth alone in the bathroom before strangling the babies and putting the bodies in the freezer.
She also confessed to killing another newborn when the couple still lived in France in 1999 and disposing of the body in the family fireplace.
Courjault told psychologists she had not felt the babies move in her womb during pregnancy.
"For me, it was never children, it was a part of me, a prolongation of myself that I killed," she said.
Jean-Louis Courjault was cleared of any involvement in a trial earlier this year.
He later said: "Society has to admit that not all pregnancies are happy. My wife certainly has a problem of a psychological order."
In a case that has gripped France, Veronique Courjault faces a life sentence if found guilty of murder.
Judges in Tours will have to decide if she knew what she was doing or was in denial over her pregnancies.
She has already spent two and a half years on remand in prison and her family insist she is no danger to society.
In 2006 Courjault and her husband Jean-Louis were living in Seoul, South Korea, where he was working as an engineer and spent long periods away from home.
His wife and their two sons, aged nine and 11, had gone to France for a summer trip while Jean-Louis stayed behind.
He bought fish and went to put it in a downstairs freezer where he then discovered the bodies.
Horrified, he alerted the police and was later allowed to fly to France to be with his wife.
They held a press conference where they said they were baffled at how the babies had got there.
But weeks later DNA tests proved they were the parents and they were arrested.
Courjault confessed to police to hiding two pregnancies from her husband in 2002 and 2003, giving birth alone in the bathroom before strangling the babies and putting the bodies in the freezer.
She also confessed to killing another newborn when the couple still lived in France in 1999 and disposing of the body in the family fireplace.
Courjault told psychologists she had not felt the babies move in her womb during pregnancy.
"For me, it was never children, it was a part of me, a prolongation of myself that I killed," she said.
Jean-Louis Courjault was cleared of any involvement in a trial earlier this year.
He later said: "Society has to admit that not all pregnancies are happy. My wife certainly has a problem of a psychological order."
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