It was November 29, 2023, a rainy day, and traffic was surprisingly limited at the Athens Mixed Jury Court. Where were the strong police forces? Where were the cameras and crews to record the continuation of the apology of the woman who allegedly committed the most heinous crime in Greek annals;
As it turned out, everyone knew the trial would not go ahead because of the lawyers’ strike, everyone but me. The journalistic fiasco would be noticeably reduced after entering her room Roulas Pispirigouof the accused in person.
For the uninitiated in courtroom dramas and apparently dealings with alleged child killers it was a scene straight out of a movie. THE accused, dressed in dark clothing, wearing her mask and handcuffs, entered escorted by police officers and took her place behind the dock. I looked around to see if any of the few people in attendance were bleeding, but no, everyone remained engrossed in their mobiles or “wells”. I kept observing the tiny woman, her hair, her movements, the way she conversed with her lawyers. She was “normal”, if such a description is correct. A normal woman, nothing disgusting, who made small talk. At one point he even laughed.
“How is that possible”
How is it possible? Perhaps the horror is habituated even if you have caused it yourself. Two years have passed since the day the 35-year-old woman first arrived at Courts of Evelpidon Street with a strong police force and wearing bulletproof vests, taking a deadline to apologise. The previous night at GADA she was pensive and repeated “how is it possible that I killed my children?”.
You felt that every day a record was broken, that every day everything got a little worse. Gradually, the only thing he became interested in was whether he “saw” Daskalakis in court.
Then we all repeated the same thing. How is it possible for a mother to kill her three children? The mind couldn’t hold it. The more hot-headed wanted to express their disgust by rallying outside the family home in Patras. “Death to child killers” was written on the shutters, others were knocking on the doors and shouting slogans – “hang her” -, some were taking selfies with the apartment building in the background. The risk of a lynching of Pispirigou’s relatives was more than visible and the evil was averted in the first place. The presumption of innocence had been torn to shreds with everyone’s responsibility.
They were unprecedented images, situations. One by one her lawyers dropped out of her defense. You felt that every day a record was broken, that every day everything got a little worse.
In the two years that followed, we consumed tons of news coverage of the case, information upon information about Georgina, Irida, Malenathe ketaminethe landlady, the tablet, Georgina’s abuse complaint that fell flat, her first assassination attempt that failed, rendering the unfortunate little girl a paraplegic, a mother’s sledgehammer on a murderous rampage at the Children’s Hospital.
We learned it Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a form of abuse in which the “caregiver,” usually the mother, “deliberately induces (or falsely reports to doctors) symptoms of illness in the person being cared for so that the latter receives medical assistance which, in some way, provides satisfaction to the cause of this physically and mentally pathogenic condition”. We plunged into a sick psyche. (The syndrome, however, according to the experts, is not a sufficient condition for the formation of a psychiatric illness that can establish unattributable or reduced attribution.)
Each new item was “plucked” across the screens until it lost its value. Gradually, the only thing that became interesting was if Pispirigou and Daskalakis “looked at each other” in court, what about their relationship. The death of the three children began to become the background of a serial, the backstory, perhaps the greatest hubris ever committed.
U.S. too; We got used to it. For two years we have been poisoned daily with small doses of toxicity. We developed a tolerance to the poison.