On Friday, the sentence for Sarah V., who was convicted of murdering her daughter, will be revealed on appeal

A shock went through the courtroom when Sarah V., previously an anesthesiologist in training and mother of three children, was sentenced to eleven years in prison on March 19, 2024. The court in Utrecht found it proven that she had tried to kill her newborn daughter in May and June 2020. Eleven years in prison was also the demand of the Public Prosecution Service, but hardly anyone in the courtroom expected the sentence to be so harsh. The confidential doctors of Veilig Thuis, who reported Sarah V. to the police in June 2020 after a report from the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital in Utrecht, expected a prison sentence of six or seven years. Sarah V.’s family – her parents, her brother and sister, her husband and his mother – repeatedly stated during the six-long day trial that they expected an acquittal.

Sarah V. has always maintained that after the birth of her daughter – three months prematurely – she was mentally ill and did not know what she was doing when she diluted the expressed breast milk with water. She continued to tell the judges that she never intended to poison her daughter with the anti-diarrheal drug loperamide, which was found in life-threatening levels in the milk. The loperamide, she said, had ended up there because she was taking the drug herself against the chronic intestinal disease celiac disease from which she suffers. Her lawyer, who had argued for acquittal, immediately appealed after the verdict. The appeal will be filed this Friday.

There is no other way than that you run the risk of death [naam van de dochter] you have taken for granted

The Public Prosecution Service also appealed because Sarah V. had been acquitted of another offense in the indictment: serious abuse of her son in the four years after his birth, in June 2016. The verdict stated that the suspicion was very strong, but the court could not conclusively establish that Sarah V. herself had caused the serious intestinal infections and other unexplained infections in her son. The child did not grow well and, after numerous operations, had to live with a feeding line, a stomach siphon, a tube and a stoma, which meant that his intestines were flushed daily.

When he was admitted to the Amsterdam UMC by Veilig Thuis in October 2020 – after the discovery of loperamide in breast milk – he was able to eat normally within two weeks, without a feeding line or any aid whatsoever. The doctors at the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital who had previously treated him had suspected for some time that Sarah V. deliberately made her son ill, but could not prove this despite camera surveillance and other measures. Sarah V. and her husband then demanded that their son’s medical file be destroyed so that no trace of any suspicion would remain.

Cardiac arrhythmias

According to pediatricians and confidential physicians, forty to sixty proven cases of child abuse by falsification occur in the Netherlands every year – that is what it is called when a child is deliberately made ill. In reality, they say, there are at least a hundred. Because this form of child abuse is so difficult to discover and prove, it is rarely reported, let alone a criminal case and conviction. One of the first times it happened was in 2023, when Jolanda M. from Zevenhuizen was sentenced to ten years in prison by the court in Breda for the manslaughter of her eleven-year-old son Mike. On appeal, the court in Den Bosch made it fifteen years for murder. Unlike the court, the court found it proven that Jolanda V. had acted with premeditation. CCTV footage showed her administering large quantities of sleeping pills, antidepressants and painkillers to her son that were not intended for him.

The criminal case against Sarah V. for child abuse by falsification is the most extensive in the Netherlands to date and in the verdict the judges spoke bluntly about attempted murder. Sarah V., they said, had added loperamide to breast milk herself, while as a doctor she should have known that the drug was dangerous for children under three years of age. She continued when her already very vulnerable daughter developed serious cardiac arrhythmias and she remained silent when the doctors treating her daughter desperately searched for a cause. “There is no other way,” the presiding judge told her, “than that you risk the death of [naam van de dochter] you have taken for granted.”

Sarah V. listened to the verdict motionless and apparently emotionless and was then immediately taken away by the police. Before she was taken into pre-trial detention – provisionally because the verdict is not yet final – she was allowed to say goodbye to her family in a separate room. Her children were not there. In May 2024, two months later, the court in Arnhem decided to suspend pre-trial detention and allow Sarah V. to stay at home with her children under supervision during the day. At the end of November, the court ruled that additional research had to be conducted into the breast milk samples that were still available.

During the appeal on Friday – one day has been set aside – the question will probably again be about whether the life-threatening amounts of loperamide had ended up in the milk through the pills that Sarah V. took or had been added from outside. Research has also been conducted again into Sarah V.’s mental state after the birth of her daughter. Was she suffering from postpartum psychosis and did she indeed not know what she was doing? The psychologists and psychiatrists engaged by the justice department who previously examined her are of the opinion that she was fully accountable at the time.

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