She has confessed to killing three of her children as newborns, but she is out of jail and awaiting trial for murder. As Correio da Manhã newspaper reported this week, the opinion of the psychiatrist called on by the Ministry of Justice “was not sufficient to determine prison” nor has the 28-year-old mother-of-one agreed to have surgery to prevent further pregnancies.
The woman, named only as Alexandra, from the little village of Ervideira, in the Alentejo, hit the headlines in summer last year when she admitted to having suffocated her newborn son with a shirt and a towel and then put him under her bed in a plastic bag.
She had hidden her pregnancy from her immediate family, but an eagle-eyed employer blew the whistle after the woman was admitted to hospital with heavy bleeding. Police then went to her home and discovered the grim truth under the bed.
Alexandra then confessed to having murdered two other newborns and thrown them in the rubbish, but police have not been able to find the bodies, and so charges are for just one case of murder as well as for profane disposing of a body.
