WORLD : Teens Kill Grandma on Birthday
CHARLEROI, Belgium — Two Belgian teen-agers murdered their grandmother on her birthday--but it took them several attempts to do so, police said today.
They first gave Solange Deval a present of chocolate eclairs laced with Valium, but she did not die.
They then forced the 62-year-old woman to inhale tear gas from a small canister used by women to fend off attackers. But again she did not die.
They finally killed her when they knocked her out with chloroform, beat her with a broom handle and strangled her, a police spokesman said.
Gravedigger Frans Mahau, the father of the pair, had confessed under questioning to plotting with his children to murder Deval at her home in the southern town of Charleroi on July 21, the spokesman said. “This was a family plot of the most macabre kind,” he added.
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