A couple in France has been taken into custody after police discovered the bodies of five infants hidden in cardboard boxes inside their home.
The grim find was made on Monday at a property in Orange, a town in the Provence region of southeastern France.
Authorities uncovered the remains one day after the 32-year-old woman reportedly gave birth at home to a healthy baby boy and was later transported to hospital.
The woman and her husband, whose identities are protected for legal reasons, had allegedly been arguing over the contents of the boxes shortly after the birth, which followed a pregnancy she had denied.
According to local media reports, it was the third occasion on which she had denied being pregnant.
When she began experiencing abdominal pain, she went to hospital, leaving her husband at the house, where he opened the boxes.
An investigating source previously told the Daily Mail that the husband “looked inside the cardboard boxes they had been arguing over – that’s when he found the five dead babies”.
The source added that “all the foetuses were decomposing, and had been around for quite a while”.
French police seals affixed to the door of an appartment in Orange, southern France, on July 28, 2026, after the bodies of five deceased infants were discovered
The horrifying discoveries were made at a house in the French town of Orange in the Provence region on Monday morning
He called the police, who are now investigating the incident.
The couple also had two children aged eight and nine, who have been taken in by relatives. The newborn was placed with social services, the prosecutor’s office said.
Medical examinations will determine the exact nature of the remains, as well as the circumstances and date of their deaths.
Florent Jean, a neighbour, told Le Parisien that the couple were ‘charming people’ who had moved into the building around two years ago and whose children attended a local primary school.
After she saw emergency services arrive for the mother, she asked herself: ‘Is she pregnant? That’s impossible, she’s so thin.’
Florent added that the woman would ‘pick up the children from school at lunchtime to eat’, while the man would ‘go to work in the morning and come back in the evening.’
The Orange horror has drawn parallels with the Dominique Cottrez multiple murder case.
Cottrez, a 45-year-old nursing assistant from northern France, confessed to killing her eight newborn children at birth and hiding their bodies.
The so-called ‘house of horror’ in Villers-au-Tertre was used to hide the bodies over almost 20 years.
Cottrez committed the murders between 1989 and 2006, by suffocating eight of her children shortly after giving birth.
The entrance to a building in Orange, Vaucluse department, southeastern France, 28 July 2026
An apartment in Orange, southern France, on July 28, 2026, after the bodies of five deceased infants were discovered
Cottrez was able to conceal her pregnancies from her husband and doctor due to being overweight, according to prosecution evidence.
In July 2010, two of the bodies were discovered in plastic bags by new owners working in the garden of Cottrez’s old house.
When police contacted her, she immediately admitted that the bodies belonged to two infants she had given birth to.
She also told police that six more infants’ bodies were hidden in the garage.
In July 2015, Cottrez was found guilty of eight counts of infanticide and sentenced to a total of nine years in prison.
In March, a French court jailed a 44-year-old woman for 25 years over the deaths of two of her newborn babies, who police found in the family freezer.
And in 2018, a court sentenced a woman with a depressive and sometimes violent husband to eight years in prison for drowning five of her newborn babies and freezing their bodies.
