Secretary Angela Maier, 26, (pictured above) was desperate to have a baby of her own but suffered three miscarriages. The depressed woman was consumed with jealousy when she then learned that her sister-in-law and best friend were pregnant.
Maier told a court in Klagenfurt, Austria: 'I couldn't stand the thought of them having babies who would be growing up when mine was dead. Mine should have been with them as well, but instead mine died while theirs went on.'
She was suffering from depression as a result of her loss and the sight of her friend's impending births. The woman cruelly poisoned the expectant mothers' drinks with medicine she was prescribed after her miscarriage.The court heard how the woman and her best friend had become pregnant at the same time, and had been shopping for baby clothes and planning together.
The friend said: 'I asked for a glass of water, and she said she had a special drink for pregnant women, that she didn't need any more. A short while later I started to bleed, and then I lost the baby. When I found out what she had done, I wrote back and told her she was a murderer. I can't forgive her.'
Two months later she invited her sister-in-law to visit and did the same thing again, mixing the medicine into her hot chocolate, and then 'watched me as I drank it', the victim told the court.
The court heard it led to both pregnant women suffering miscarriages. Maier went on to have a baby of her own, and now has a three-year-old daughter.
Eaten up with guilt at what she had done, and in the end she had written to both women to confess two years later after she learned that both were once again pregnant.
She was sentenced by the court to 18 months in prison, with 14 suspended, after the court ruled that she was psychologically sound although she had, it accepted, been suffering from depression.
Judge Michaela Sanin said: 'You maliciously took the lives of two unborn babies.'
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