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  Nine Dead Babies: German Mother Tells How She Murdered Her Newborns

Nine Dead Babies German Mother Tells How She Murdered Her Newborns

Part 2: NEXT PAGE: "At Some Point, It Was Dead"

The baby -- like ones before it -- happened to come at a time when no one saw it and in a way that enabled her to hide it from everyone. She told investigators that on the night she arrived in Goslar, she was alone in her room when the contractions began. They lasted through the morning and continued into the next morning, when a friend stopped by to see what Sabine was doing. The training class was about to begin, the friend said. Wasn't Sabine going? Sabine mumbled something about having a very heavy menstruation and a migrane and stayed in bed. While her classmates sat in the seminar, Sabine gave birth. She then wrapped the baby in a towel or sheet and took it into bed with her. When her friend stopped by later that day to see how she was, she said she hid the baby under the covers and asked if the friend would mind bringing her pain medication and some sanitary napkins.

The baby cried through the night. In the morning, Sabine said she stuffed most of the bloody laundry, along with the baby, into her travel bag. The baby's head bulged out of the bag. She was driving part of the way home in a friend's car and when no one was looking, she slipped the bag into the trunk of the car. She took the bag with her when the two seperated in Berlin.

Investigators don't know how Sabine got home to Frankfurt an der Oder. Her story only becomes understandable again when she and the baby arrive in the apartment on Democracy Square. It was still alive at that point, but breathing weakly, and she walked around with it in her arms. And then "at some point, it was dead," she said.

Her husband and kids weren't at home and she drowned out the birth and death with large doses of alcohol. She vaguely remembers "waking up" in the midst of burying the baby on the balcony.

After that, she began a regular routine of hard drinking. She drank schnapps from the bottle and boxed wine from the carton. "When my thoughts drifted to the baby and the pregnancy," she said, "when I thought about what it would be and what it should be named, I drank more." Sabine can't say how many more births there were in the following years. When investigators -- who found nine infant corpses -- told her the number, she said that sounded possible.

She claims she only has two real memories from the foggy period of her drunken existence. She remembers that her husband used to come home from work at 5 p.m. and that at one point she had to rush a delivery along to prevent him from witnessing it. She also recalls the image of a "cold, blue baby" which she says was "wrapped in cellophane."

Entering the Black Hole

After that death came years in which Sabine fought with the two sides of her personality. One side struggled for a normal life, while the other ruined everything that mattered to her. During this time, Sabine encouraged her three living children in school, did their homework with them and saw that all finished high school. Steffanie even got high honors on her final high school examination. Sabine wanted to believe that her family was a perfectly normal, middle-class German family living an orderly life. She bitterly defended this veneer of normality.

Although once she was so loaded she almost fell off a stool at a friend's house, she insists she doesn't have an alcohol problem. She also doesn't like to discuss her marriage. Investigators believe Oliver abused her, sometimes beating her to the point that she had large purple and blue bruises. But she only tells stories of how she fell down the stairs and bumped herself. Once, her nephew came home and found her tied to the apartment's heater. But she refused to say what had happened. Life just continued as if nothing unusual had occurred.

Somehow -- using over-sized clothes and a large repository of lies -- Sabine managed to hide her pregnancies from everyone. In the mid-1990s, one of her friends got her a job at her husband's company. At one point, the husband asked casually, "Hey, can it be that Sabine is pregnant?" The wife answered no, that Sabine "always looks like that." But then the wife got to thinking and asked Sabine herself. Sabine's answer was so adamant that the friend never dared to ask again.

Over time, Sabine's dark side gradually gained more and more control of her life. Sometimes she would get so drunk that she stood in the entry of her apartment, in front of an open elevator, but could not figure out how to get inside. Or, sometimes she would end up in the basement, although she was trying to get to the sixth floor. When Oliver couldn't deal with her anymore, he called her family in Brieskow-Finkenheerd to come and take her. They would bring her home for weeks at a time. Sometimes when she arrived, she would be very fat. Other times, she would be thinner. The rumor in the village was that she was perhaps a surrogate mother.

Here and there she found work. But nothing was regular. In 1999, for instance, the year of the last infant murder, she got a job in the former Frankfurt an der Oder museum Viadrina. The museum's director, Martin Schieck, remembers that she would always arrive at work looking "extremely dapper." She did her job "diligently and showed initiative," he said. At least in the mornings. But, as the day progressed, one could see -- and smell -- her alcohol problem. The staff then removed from public view. By the end of the year, she was let go.

For years, Sabine's marriage was just one of convenience -- a sort of habit. Sometimes, sex was part of the mix. Sabine insists that all the dead babies belonged to Oliver, despite the fact that he was often away for weeks and months at a stretch. In 2001, he had had enough and moved out for good. Sabine's three practically grown children, disappointed that she couldn't quit drinking, went with him. The marriage officially ended this year.

With Oliver and her kids gone, Sabine knew her game was up. Not only had her world fallen apart, but the facade was also crumbling. All she had left were her dead children, and she couldn't tear herself away from the little graveyard on her balcony. When she stopped paying rent and was finally evicted in mid-2003, she brought the flower pots to her family's home.

But the madness went on. New men came along. She shoplifted from a department store. She couldn't pay the rent at her new place, and other bills were piling up -- €500 euros for the mobile phone, €950 for the television. Her only ray of light was her daughter Elizabeth, born a year and a half earlier, supposedly from a relationship with a lover named Jan. But why did she allow this child to live? Perhaps because the others -- the living as well as the dead -- were gone, and Sabine had nothing else to hold on to?

A few weeks ago, the dark side of her life suddenly surfaced. While cleaning up the yard and garden shed in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a nephew found the human bones Sabine had hidden and called the police. She told police she had kept the bones close to her because she couldn't bear to be separated from them. Investigators found them behind a fence, from which an advertisement still hangs. It's slogan, though, has taken on a macabre new meaning: "Potting Soil -- the stuff from which life begins."