Greek mother given two more life sentences for killing her children

A Greek woman sentenced to life last year for murdering her nine-year-old daughter received two additional life terms on Tuesday for killing her two other children.

The case had gripped public attention in Greece for years.

The court in Athens found that Roula Pispirigou suffocated her infant daughters Malena and Irida in 2019 and 2021, in what were ultimately unsuccessful attempts to prevent her husband repeatedly abandoning her.

“The trial… has dispelled any doubts as to her guilt,” said Eva Ambazi, the lawyer for Pispirigou’s husband Manos Daskalakis.

“The court found her guilty of murdering Malena and Irida in a calm state of mind,” Ambazi told reporters.

Pispirigou, 36, insists she is innocent and will appeal against the sentence.

Addressing the three judges and four jurors who unanimously found her guilty, she said she would “fight to the end to win justice” for her daughters.

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A separate court had found her guilty in March 2024 of killing her nine-year-old daughter Georgina.

That led to a reassessment of the deaths of Malena and Irida which revealed they had been asphyxiated, thus sparking a new murder trial.

Trial prosecutor Vassiliki Dimopoulou told the Athens court earlier this month that Pispirigou had killed her children “to keep her marriage going”.

“This shows a person who acted methodically and with forethought,” she said.

‘Modern-day Medea’

Pispirigou, a trained nurse from Patras, was found last year to have poisoned Georgina in January 2022, using ketamine.

The substance is employed as an anaesthetic in veterinary surgery but is also used in some treatments for depression.

When Georgina died, she was in hospital.

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She had been admitted on several occasions over the previous 10 months after convulsions had left her tetraplegic.

The court found that her mother had tried to kill her on at least one of the previous hospital stays.

Daughters Malena and Iris were aged just three and a half and six months when they died in 2019 and 2021 respectively.

Malena had been declared as suffering from acute liver failure.

The cause of death for Iris had initially been registered as heart failure.

But tests following the death of Georgina showed they had been suffocated.

Greek media have dubbed Pispirigou a “modern-day Medea” after a figure in Greek mythology who murders her sons after their father leaves her for another woman.

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– By: © Agence France-Presse