A French woman
who left her baby daughter to drown on a beach said Monday she had no other
explanation but “witchcraft”.
Fabienne Kabou, 39, went on trial for the murder
of 15-month-old Adelaide which shocked the country in November 2013.
The French
woman of Senegalese origin described her well-off childhood in Dakar before she
moved to Paris to study philosophy and architecture and fell in love with a
sculptor 30 years her senior, Michel Lafon.
“In 2011 I fell pregnant with
Adelaide, she was born in August and I ended up killing her, 15 months after
her birth,” she told the court in the northeastern town of Saint-Omer.
Kabou
travelled with her daughter from their home in Paris to the northern resort
town of Berck-sur-Mer where she enquired about the local tides before heading
to the beach.
She said goodbye to her sleeping daughter and placed her near the
water on a wintry night. The baby’s lifeless body was discovered early the next
morning by prawn fishermen.
“Witchcraft. That is my default explanation because
I have no other,” she told the court. Kabou said she had spent some 40,000
euros ($45,000) consulting various “witchdoctors and healers” before carrying
out the murder.
“Nothing makes sense in this story. What interest could I have
in tormenting myself, lying, killing my daughter? I spoke of sorcery and I am
not joking. Even a stupid person would not do what I did.”
– ‘I had
hallucinations’- Kabou’s lawyer Fabienne Roy-Nansion pushed her to explain why
she thought evil forces were at work. “For many years I struggled to wake up in
the morning, my feet were paralysed.
I had hallucinations, like the walls which
didn’t stop trembling,” said Kabou, who is charged with premeditated murder and
faces life in prison. From the start she has made little effort to hide or deny
her crime, and video surveillance allowed police to track her down 10 days
afterwards to her home — a renovated art studio where she lived with Adelaide’s
father.
Roy-Nansion describes Kabou as from a well-to-do Catholic background
and of “remarkable intelligence”. A court-appointed psychiatrist found that her
“psychological status is largely influenced by cultural references and an
individual history linked to Senegalese witchcraft that radically altered her
view of the world”. However a lawyer for a children’s group that is a civil
party to the case, Jean-Christophe Boyer, accused Kabou of using witchcraft as
a defence strategy. “You are faced with a very intelligent woman who knows she
must not say she is mad, but give enough to the experts to appear mad, so you
have sorcery and it is part of her culture,” he said.
Another court
psychiatrist, Paul Bensussan, said her act was possibly triggered by a deep
depression related to the birth of her child. Her lawyer has said the child was
born in the couple’s home and was never registered. No one close to the couple,
not even Kabou’s mother, knew of her existence. The pregnancy “was a happy
surprise for her, not necessarily for the father.
I think she felt deeply
alone,” Roy-Nansion said before the trial. The father, Michel Lafon, a
sculptor, did not take an interest in or recognise the child, according to
court documents. A DNA test was carried out after Kabou’s arrest to prove his
paternity. Kabou has told investigators she chose the town because it sounded
like a “sad” place. “Even the name is sad.”
Berck means means “yuck” in French,
though it is the Flemish word for dune. “The two years before the murder of my
daughter were the worst of my life. The two years in prison have been calmer
and more peaceful,” she said in court.
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