When a Mother's Instinct Fails: The Saddest Cases in Czech Criminal History

When this protective instinct fails, people tend to panic. Discussions on social media quickly fill with frightening comments asking whether we are facing some kind of new and terrible epidemic.

But criminal statistics from the last fifty years tell a different story. No, there is no epidemic. Mothers murdering their own children are extremely rare and abnormal events in the Czech Republic. The impression that such cases happen frequently is created mainly by enormous media attention and the growing popularity of True Crime podcasts.

Still, Czech history remembers several horrifying cases that have become permanently written into the history of Czech criminal investigation.

What could have happened inside the minds of women who crossed one of the darkest taboos imaginable?

Široký Důl (2011): A Fourfold Tragedy That Changed the View of Exceptional Punishments

Even today, this remains one of the most brutal and saddest cases in the modern history of the Czech Republic.

In September 2011, a terrible tragedy took place in the small village of Široký Důl in the Svitavy region.

Thirty-six-year-old Romana Z. murdered her four children inside the family home. The youngest boy was only two months old. The oldest daughter was eight.

The children had no chance of survival. The crime involved suffocation as well as cutting injuries.

The woman then attempted a highly visible suicide by hanging and cutting herself, but the police who arrived at the house managed to save her.

During the trial, she defended herself by claiming that she had completely lost her memory and could not remember anything about the day of the crime.

However, court experts concluded that at the time of the murders she was not suffering from a mental disorder that would have prevented her from understanding the dangerous nature of her actions.

The result was an exceptional sentence of life imprisonment.

She is serving her sentence in the women's prison in Opava.

Dolní Dunajovice (2012–2014): When Cold Selfishness Wins

While many similar tragedies are connected with a sudden psychological breakdown or serious mental illness, the case from South Moravia shocked the public because of its cold and systematic nature.

Over a period of three years, a young woman gave birth to three newborn babies and killed each of them shortly after birth.

She hid the bodies in different places around the family home and garden in Dolní Dunajovice.

The entire case only came to light in 2014.

After her third secret pregnancy and birth, the woman suffered massive bleeding and had to be taken to hospital. The doctors immediately became suspicious and contacted the police.

According to psychiatric experts, the motive was neither financial desperation nor psychosis.

It was described as pure selfishness.

The woman was afraid that having more children would cause her to lose her partner, her home and the comfortable lifestyle she wanted to keep.

The court sentenced her to twenty-two years in prison.

The Invisible Enemy: When Mental Illness Takes Over

There is another, completely different category of cases in which mothers act under the influence of severe psychosis or schizophrenia.

In such moments, a woman may no longer perceive reality as it really is.

She can become convinced that she is actually protecting or saving her child from an imagined evil, demons or a cruel world.

Břevnov (2019)

In 2019, a thirty-seven-year-old mother attacked her nine-year-old son with a knife and caused injuries which proved fatal.

The investigation showed that the woman had been suffering from a serious mental disorder and had stopped taking her medication without medical advice.

At the time of the attack, she was considered legally insane and unable to control her actions.

The court therefore could not send her to prison. Instead, it ordered compulsory psychiatric treatment.

Česká Lípa (2013)

A similarly tragic case took place in Česká Lípa.

There, a mother brutally killed her four-year-old daughter.

Experts diagnosed the woman with a severe form of schizophrenia.

She was declared criminally irresponsible and placed in secure detention.

A Look Into the Past: Hidden Tragedies of the Socialist Era

If we look back over the last fifty years, we also have to look at the period before 1989.

The communist regime in Czechoslovakia was very interested in creating an image of the “perfect socialist family”.

Reports about children being murdered were practically absent from newspapers because the authorities did not want to create panic or damage the carefully constructed image of socialist society.

However, criminal archives from the 1970s and 1980s show that these tragedies were occurring at a rate that was not very different from today.

In many cases, the victims were newborn babies of unmarried women from rural areas.

These cases were often connected with unwanted pregnancies and what was then described as infanticide.

Another factor was postpartum psychosis, which was much less understood and described by medicine at that time.

When it was proven that a mother had acted during a severe postpartum mental breakdown, sentences were generally around fifteen years, and women often ended up in psychiatric institutions rather than ordinary prisons.

The death penalty existed in Czechoslovakia at that time, but women were not sentenced to death for these specific crimes.

The murder of one's own child remains one of the darkest shadows of the human mind.

But statistics can also offer us some reassurance.

Maternal instinct wins in 99.99 percent of cases.

Perhaps this is the most important thing to remember.

The horrifying cases attract enormous attention precisely because they are so unusual.

Most mothers do not hurt their children.

Most mothers protect them, worry about them, lose sleep because of them and would do almost anything to keep them safe.

That is why stories about the few who cross this terrible boundary feel so shocking to us.

Sources

• Interviews and expert analyses concerning infanticide: Long-term police and psychological statistics and analyses by Czech criminologist and psychologist Ludmila Čírtková, including interviews concerning the typology of female offenders and violence between parents.

• The Široký Důl case (2011): Contemporary reporting about the life sentence given to Romana Z. and information concerning the motive and the court proceedings, including reports by Novinky.cz and the Czech public broadcaster iROZHLAS.

• The Dolní Dunajovice case (2012–2014): Court reporting concerning the woman who killed three newborn children, including coverage by Brněnský deník and Czech Television's ČT24.

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