A kidnapping case was met with revulsion and shock after a one-year-old baby was found dead in a bin, with her mother later confessing to the murder.
One-year-old baby Vanille was found dead in the city of Angers after a kidnapping alert had been triggered the day before. The infant’s body was discovered in a garbage bin next to her home, according to prosecutor Eric Bouillard.
The mother of the infant, Nathalie Stephan, had been arrested prior to the discovery of the infant, as she was suspected of kidnapping. When she later confessed to either strangling or suffocating the child after hours of denials, she led police to the bin in which she had dumped the body of her daughter.
According to the prosecutor of Angers, Stephan suffers from severe psychological disorders and was involved in a suicidal episode several months prior to the murder, Le Parisien reports.
Stephan had been staying at a home for pregnant women and single mothers for the better part of a year and was allowed to see her daughter, who had been taken away by the state at birth and placed with a foster family.
Prosecutor Bouillard said that Stephan could either face detention in prison or hospitalisation following her court case.
The French case bears some similarity to the murder of a seven-year-old girl in Austria in 2018 by a Chechen teen migrant. He had lured the young girl into his home and stabbed her to death before putting her body in a trash bin, where she was later found.
The Chechen claimed the motivation for the murder had been the fact he was having a “bad day” at the time.
France has seen a surge in violent crime, including murders and attempted murders which have increased by 79 per cent over the last ten years.