She remained stoic at the statement of the verdict. A sentence of life imprisonment was pronounced on Wednesday against Nathalie Stéphan, 42, by the Assize Court of Maine-et-Loire for the murder of her one-year-old daughter, Vanille, in February 2020 in Angers. Considering her “action driven by a cold and premeditated will”, the court condemned this woman to the maximum sentence accompanied by “a security period of 22 years”, in accordance with the requisitions.
On February 7, 2020, Nathalie Stéphan did not show up at the maternal center in Angers, a home for single mothers where she had been staying for a year, when she was expected there with her daughter. His laptop, turned off, cannot be geolocated. A kidnapping alert was triggered on February 8 after 24 hours of research to try to find Vanille. On the morning of Sunday February 9, the accused was found in a hotel in Nantes, without her daughter. The body of the baby will be discovered a few hours later, on the indications of the mother, in a garbage bag hidden in a dumpster for clothes in Angers.
The autopsy determined that the little girl, whose first birthday it was, died of “suffocation”. “Since she was struggling, I pressed with my hand very, very, very hard,” admitted Nathalie Stéphan to the investigators. “She claims the facts. She even goes so far as to explain all the solutions she thought of for six weeks to kill her daughter, ”noted the Advocate General. Nathalie Stéphan had specified during the investigation that she had developed her macabre project when she learned in December 2019 of the continuation of her daughter’s placement and that she had to leave the maternal center on February 10.
“Not a Tear”
Nathalie Stéphan, head down and face impassive in her box, does not “show any affect, any emotion, not even a tear for her daughter Vanille”, underlined for her part Me Mathilde Livenais, lawyer for Vanille’s maternal assistant who is is a civil party. Photos, taken by the person who took care of the child from the age of one month, show a little girl “a bit naughty” and “full of life”.
If the accused suffers from a “borderline” personality disorder, she “was fully aware of her act” according to the psychiatric expert reports which underline “her coldness” and “a high level of dangerousness”. “How can you become a good mother when you yourself grew up without the love of your parents? “, retorted the defense lawyer Me Olivia Brulay. The accused “always tried to be a normal person” but “felt abandoned by justice” after a complaint dismissed “when her despot father raped her while her mother was in a room next door”, argued Olivia Brulay.
