UPDATE 2: The Korea Times is reporting that Mr. C’s wife was the mother of the infants:
The wife of the Frenchman, at whose house two dead babies were found, was the mother of the infants, according to the police Monday.
The police said that DNA testing by the National Institute of Scientific Investigation showed the wife’s DNA matched the DNA from the babies, who were found in a refrigerator at their house in Sorae village, southern Seoul, the largest French community here.
“We also confirmed that the 39-year-old wife attended an obstetric clinic in Korea. It was also found she did not go out of the house for about two months _ one month before and one month after visiting the clinic,” a police officer said.
ORIGINAL POST: According to MBC, police may learn the identity of the mother of the dead babies found frozen in Frenchmen Mr. C’s freezer by tomorrow at the earliest.
By examining Mr. C’s telephone records and doing a bit of legwork, Seoul’s finest singled out several women they believe may be the mother of the dead infants. DNA results are expected either tomorrow or the next day.
UPDATE: The JoongAng Ilbo reports that DNA believed to be the mother’s was found on several items in Mr. C’s bathroom, including toothbrushes and ear swabs. It also noted that police have narrowed their list of potential moms to about 10 women both foreign and domestic.
27 Comments
Toothbrushes and earswabs? That says, “Someone living there” to me, which would be mom or daughter (if he has a daughter) I’d think. This is getting very weird. It was weird to start with, but unless the ROK police lab people are highly incompetent, this is getting too weird.
If I didn’t know the man was the one who called the police, given the toothbrush and earswab thing, I’d be expecting to hear he and his wife were locked up for this……Now I haven’t much of a clue….but it is weird….
I don’t think this would be so weird if it were handled by a competent police force.
So is Mr. C now confirmed to be the father?
The Korea Times reported the wife was the mother. Strange indeed.
Who knows why people do things, but why the father would report the bodies if it were him and his wife is an impossible guess, but within the realm of possibility. Why they would just not dispose of the bodies is a mystery…
Have they ever said roughly what stage of development the babies were in? Post-birth or fetuses?
And the chance of them coming back is pretty much zero now (the couple, not the dead babies).
This is just one weird story. I’m guessing Mr. C may have not known that his wife had given birth or maybe he didn’t even know she was pregnant! And she didn’t want him to know for some reason. After all, why would he turn the bodies over to the police if he was in it with her (in terms of the births and deaths)? But why she wouldn’t tell him or would put the bodies in the freezer?!? That is weird. Abortion is easy enough to get here in Korea. Is she nuts?
I guess the next step will be to find out if the deaths occured after birth or if they were stillborn. If they were murdered, this story will continue to be bizarre.
Her fertilized eggs in another woman. Freaky French Raelians I tell ya.
According to the Korean news, the babies were dead for 2 years and 7 months. The mother is the prime suspect now. The father may not have known she was pregnent. Possible scenarios could be marriage discord or the mother is mentally unstable.
How could the dude not know his wife were pregnant? How could they not expect that these things would be discovered? Or why would they turn it in at all knowing these things would be made public and people that he works with, who will eventually return to France, will know about it? Either the Frenchman and his wife are completely stupid and psychotic or the police force has no idea what they are doing, especially when it comes to reading/analyzing DNA evidence.
Wasn’t getting any from Madame, hence his incursions into, er, forbidden land?
So are we saying his wife’s conyo is forbidden land? It’s not nice to talk about another man’s bistec con bigote that way.
Is the husband the father? Has that been established? (Don’t remember now.) If so, this whole thing makes no sense at all. Is someone else the father?
Mrs. C is the mom, Fonzie’s obviously the father, Mr. C was out to lunch, makes perfect sense.
one has to wonder if this is a failed copy-cat crime of the disaperance of richie’s older brother in season one.
I know the French aren’t known for the same bad habits as Americans, but she could have been quite overweight…
“Is the husband the father? ”
The police say the DNA results say yes.
Without cooperation from prime witnesses, it makes this case doubly difficult to solve.
It should be noted that the police are also saying they’ve matched the DNA results to the French man’s wife by swiping DNA off of the wife’s toothbrush and hair in the house. But who is to say that the toothbrush and hair are definitely hers? Why couldn’t the French police provide the wife’s DNA results?
“I know the French aren’t known for the same bad habits as Americans, but she could have been quite overweight…”
And she was overweight.
Baker (comment 12):
Wow, you packed more pop culture references in there than in a typical Simpsons episode!
***
Was someone speculating a couple of weeks back that this might have been a home birth that failed, and that perhaps the parents were using an unlicensed midwife, hence the attempt to hide the evidence? But this makes no sense either, since wasn’t it the father who initially reported this to the police?
It seems to be a crime in search of a motive at this point….
“….Prior to moving into his current residence in Banpo-dong in August of last year, he’d lived for three years in a villa apartment in Bangbae-dong….”
“….According to the Korean news, the babies were dead for 2 years and 7 months….”
WTH? The babies were moved? Or did they know the prior resident of the place there in now and the babies were always in that location?
Motives and logic and thinking aside, if the DNA tests hold up, and I’m on the jury, 2 people are convicted….
“of what” would be a fascinating question…
What if Mrs. C was psychologially traumatized by a miscarriage at home and for some unknown reason decided to freeze the babies? Is she guilty of something? She didn’t kill the babies. Perhaps the husband didn’t know about the pregnancy or the miscarriage.
So when we ask Mrs C why she froze the dead fetuses she breaks down and says she couldn’t, and didn’t want to, face losing them…..something like that. Is that a crime? I don’t know. If that’s the case I wouldn’t punish her.
In lots of places, failure to report a death and failure to properly dispose of human remains are both crimes. Of course, both of those are pretty much misdemeanors when they are crimes. On the other hand, I’m not sure how miscarriages and stillbirths are treated. Heck, in some places, storing the remains of a miscarriage in your freezer might be nothing more than a health code violation. However, I’m willing to bet that a fully-formed, stillborn fetus would be treated slightly differently, and would probably be back into the ‘human remains’ category. And at that, I have no idea of what the laws are like in South Korea on this one.
“WTH? The babies were moved? Or did they know the prior resident of the place there in now and the babies were always in that location?”
The place where the babies were found, the French occupants first moved in about a year ago. So yes, the babies were transported from somewhere else. Ghoulish.
I guess I am kind of at a loss how to process the case too. I mean - no GIs, taxis, ESL instructors, nothing…….I have no background information from which to process this…….The guy wasn’t even Russian……
I can’t relate this to the French attack on Kanghwa Island and the recent return of national treasures, can I????
Frozen dead babies are rarely considered national treasures.
In the meantime, this case has finally made the French news. Here’s a translation of the first article I saw on the subject.