New Delhi, July 29 -- ORANGE, France - The cardboard boxes had been accumulating in the apartment for reasons he could not fully account for, and his wife had told him repeatedly not to touch them. On Monday night, with her in hospital after giving birth at home, he finally opened one.

Inside a plastic bag was a decomposing body. He kept looking. There were four more.

The man, 32, notified the hospital where his wife was recovering from an at-home delivery of a healthy baby girl born the night before. Hospital staff telephoned the prosecutor's office. By Tuesday morning, investigators had opened a murder inquiry in Orange, a market town of roughly 30,000 in southeastern France, known for a Roman amphitheater built under Augustus and ver...