A 41-year-old woman from Doetinchem has been sentenced to five years in prison for the manslaughter of her baby, Sem Vijverberg. The ruling comes nearly nineteen years after the baby was found in a frozen pond on the outskirts of a residential area in Doetinchem.
The court concluded that the woman killed her child, though the exact circumstances surrounding the birth remain unclear. The sentence exceeds the prosecution’s demand of four years.
The mother claimed memory loss regarding the pregnancy and birth, but the court in Arnhem found this implausible. The baby, discovered in January 2006 by three children, had been dead for several days.
Despite extensive investigations, the case remained unsolved until a media campaign in 2021 led to a tip identifying the biological mother, who was arrested in September 2022.
Source: NOS