VIENNA, Austria (AP) – A 32-year-old bookkeeper was arrested and confessed to killing her four newborns out of despair over her inability to pay the bills and her fear that having a child might drive away her longtime male partner, police said Friday.

Her 38-year-old companion, who denied involvement, also was arrested and placed under investigation.

The first of the tiny bodies was discovered Monday by an unidentified tenant who wanted to get ice cream for his children from the freezer that the neighbors shared in the multifamily complex, Graz’s Kleine Zeitung newspaper reported.

Stunned, he called police, who later located another beneath the mound of frozen meat and vegetables. Both bodies were wrapped in plastic bags.

A trained dog led investigators to a third body – that of a newborn girl – that had been placed in a paint bucket filled with concrete to conceal the remains, Austrian state broadcaster ORF said.

Police found the fourth body Friday in a garden shed as they searched the premises for clues to the killings. It, too, had been placed in a plastic pail filled with concrete and hidden beneath a pile of debris, officials said.

Although officials initially considered the possibility that the infants may have been stillborn, evidence at the scene pointed to slayings, police said in a statement.

The woman’s partner allegedly told police he was unaware of her pregnancies and insisted he played no role in either the slayings or the hiding of the bodies.

Autopsies were conducted, but results were not expected before Monday, officials said.

DNA tests will be carried out on the woman’s companion.

, who is married but separated from the wife with whom he had three children, to determine if he was the father, Jud said.

“Various reasons can lead women into such violent situations that they can’t even think straight,” said Dr. Roswith Roth of the University of Graz’s Institute of Psychology.

“When a mother kills a child right after its birth, it’s clear that she does so because she sees no other way out,” Roth told the Austria Press Agency. “There is still an enormous amount of ignorance in how to prevent such things.”

Although the province of Styria where Graz is regional capital has had a program in place since 2001 allowing women who don’t want to keep their babies to give birth anonymously, women’s advocates called for greater attention to their plight.

“The climate in which a woman must deal with an unplanned pregnancy is not very supportive in Austria,” said Sylvia Groth, who heads a women’s health center in Graz.

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