When the Maternal Instinct Fails: The Saddest Cases in Czech Criminal History

When this protective mechanism fails, we tend to panic. Discussions on social media immediately fill with apocalyptic comments asking if we are experiencing some new and frightening epidemic.

But criminal statistics from the last 50 years speak clearly: No, there is no epidemic. Mothers murdering their own children are extremely rare and abnormal events in the Czech Republic. The impression that it happens often is created mainly by enormous media attention and the growth of True Crime podcasts.

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

What had to happen inside the minds of women who crossed the darkest taboo?

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

It is still considered one of the most brutal and saddest cases in the modern history of the Czech Republic.

In September 2011, a terrible tragedy happened in the small village of Široký Důl in the Svitavy region. Even experienced investigators described the case with tears in their eyes.

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

A combination of suffocation and cutting injuries gave the children no chance.

Afterwards, the woman tried to kill herself by hanging and cutting herself, but the police who arrived managed to save her.

At the trial, she defended herself by saying she had completely lost her memory and could remember nothing from the day of the crime.

Court experts, however, concluded that she was not suffering from any mental disorder at the time which would prevent her from understanding the dangerous nature of her actions.

The result was an exceptional sentence of life imprisonment, which she is serving in the women's prison in Opava.

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

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

Over a period of three years, a young woman gave birth several times and killed three of her newborn children shortly after their births.

She hid the babies' bodies inside the family house and in the garden in Dolní Dunajovice.

The whole case came to light only in 2014, when after her third secret birth the woman ended up in hospital with massive bleeding. Doctors immediately became suspicious and contacted the police.

According to psychiatrists, the motive was not financial trouble or psychosis, but pure selfishness.

The woman was afraid that having more children would make her lose her partner, her home and her comfortable lifestyle.

The court sentenced her to 22 years in prison.

The Invisible Enemy: When Mental Illness Kills

A completely different category are cases in which mothers act under the influence of severe psychosis or schizophrenia.

At such moments, a woman may not see reality as it really is. She can be convinced that she is “saving” her child from imagined evil, demons or a cruel world.

• Břevnov (2019): A thirty-seven-year-old mother attacked her nine-year-old son with a knife and caused fatal injuries. The investigation showed that the woman suffered from a serious mental disorder and had stopped taking her medication on her own before the attack. At the time of the attack, she was legally considered completely insane and unable to control her actions. The court therefore could not send her to prison and ordered institutional psychiatric treatment instead.

• Česká Lípa (2013): A similar tragedy happened in Česká Lípa, where a mother brutally killed her four-year-old daughter. Experts diagnosed her with a severe form of schizophrenia. She was found not criminally responsible and was placed in a secure detention facility.

A Look Into the Past: Hidden Tragedies of Socialism

If we look back over the last 50 years, we also have to look at the period before 1989.

The communist regime of that time cared strongly about creating an image of the “perfect socialist family”. Murders of children were hardly written about in newspapers because the authorities did not want to spread panic.

Criminal archives from the 1970s and 1980s, however, show that these tragedies did happen at a similar rate as today.

In many cases, they involved unwanted pregnancies of unmarried women in rural areas, what was then described as infanticide, or postpartum psychosis, which was much less understood medically at the time.

When it was proven that a mother had acted during a state of postpartum insanity, sentences could be around 15 years and women could end up in psychiatric institutions.

The death penalty existed in Czechoslovakia at that time, but women were not given the death penalty 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 calm us down.

The maternal instinct wins in 99.99% of cases.

Sources used and checked:

• Interviews and expert analyses about infanticide: Long-term police and psychological statistics have been discussed by psychologist Ludmila Čírtková in interviews for Šance dětem and iDNES, where she examines the typology of female offenders and statistics concerning violence between parents.

• Široký Důl case (2011): The life sentence for Romana Z. and details about the motive, described as an extended suicide, were reported by Novinky.cz and the verdict of the Regional Court in Hradec Králové is archived by iROZHLAS.

• Dolní Dunajovice case (2012–2014): The verdict of the Regional Court in Brno, which sentenced the mother of three newborns to prison, was covered in detail by Brněnský deník and ČT24.