Top court upholds 8-year sentence for mother who killed newborns, stored bodies in freezer

South Korea’s Supreme Court has upheld an eight-year prison term for a woman who killed her two newborn babies and hid their bodies in her refrigerator.

The top court confirmed a lower court’s verdict that sentenced the mother, in her 30s, on charges of murder and concealing of a corpse on Oct. 8, according to media reports Friday.

She was convicted of strangling a daughter and a son to death shortly after their birth in November 2018 and November 2019, respectively. Prosecutors said that after each birth, she took the babies near her home or to a nearby alley where she murdered. She placed their bodies inside black plastic bags and stored them inside her refrigerator in her apartment in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province.

The bodies of the babies were kept in the fridge for four years and seven months and three years and seven months, respectively.

The mother admitted to killing the babies, claiming financial hardship while raising her three other children.

Her crime came to light in May 2023, when the government’s Board of Audit and Inspection found the babies’ births were never officially registered, although there was a record of their births in the hospital, leading to a police investigation.

During the trial, she argued that she should be charged with infanticide rather than murder, which carries a heavier punishment in South Korea. She also claimed that she had been in a state of mental distress at the time of the crime, but the court rejected these arguments.

In the initial trial, the judges handed down an eight-year sentence, saying her actions warranted a conviction on both murder and body concealment charges. Both the prosecution and the defendant objected to the verdict with appeals, but the appellate court maintained the sentence.