Debt-ridden parents tried to kill family

A desperate couple tried to kill their five children and themselves by injecting them with insulin after running up €250,000 of debt with 20 different credit firms, a French court heard yesterday.

Emmanuel Cartier, 37, a machine operator, and his wife, Patricia, 44, a carer for the elderly, appeared at Beauvais court, north of Paris, charged with murder and attempted murder after falling into what their lawyer, Hubert Delarue, called an "infernal spiral" of consumer spending and easily obtained credit.

One of the couple's daughters, Alicia, died in hospital after the injection. The others survived and now live with relatives: the doses administered by Patricia Cartier, using seven syringes and three bottles of insulin taken from her workplace, proved too small to be lethal.

After 15 years of marriage, the Cartiers, described by a psychiatrist as "immature, emotionally insecure and depressed", had six different bank accounts, 21 distinct consumer loans and 15 credit cards. They earned €1,300 (£900) a month each, with an extra €500 in family allowances.

Before the trial, Mr Cartier told the daily Libération that consumer credit was "like the air you breathe: you see an attractive ad, you call up. You get a form, you fill it in. The cheque arrives in the post 48 hours later. You never see or speak to anyone. You repay so little you barely notice. It gives you the feeling life is sweet."

The couple lived in a new bungalow bought five years ago after paying an adviser from the mortgage company to consolidate debts. "I never thought we'd get the mortgage," Mr Cartier said. "When we did, I thought well, those people know better than us. We're plainly OK." Most of the borrowing went on their children, Mederic, Alicia, Mathilde, Marina, and Thomas, aged between 11 months and 13 years; each had a television, two had PCs and three had hi-fi and games consoles.

By May 2002, Mr Cartier said, he was spending "entire nights" juggling loans, credit cards and bank accounts - transferring debt from one to another, repaying a little here and borrowing a bit there, taking advances on his pay cheques.

But in August that year, a cash machine swallowed one of the credit cards. Then their bank refused to pay the electricity bill. And suddenly, the whole edifice collapsed: debt collectors began calling, writs began replacing loan offers in the post.

Documents revealed that the couple used a last cheque from one credit firm to buy new clothes for the children "so they'd be well dressed in the next world". They went for a meal at a local restaurant.

Then Patricia gave everyone except her husband an injection, telling the children it was "a vaccination for a holiday abroad". Mr Cartier was supposed to slit his wrists, but managed little more than a scratch before calling the emergency services.

The couple, who were freed last year after two years in prison but face life sentences if convicted, were "living by the infernal logic of a consumer society, sucked into a terrible spiral of debt, taken in by the poisonous charm of revolving credit", said their lawyer. "There are responsibilities, but it would be profoundly unjust if they were to bear them all."