July 20, 2008
Murder in Versailles
by
Marilyn Z. Tomlins
Thursday, September 30, 1993.
It was going to be a quiet day in Versailles, France's "City of Kings." Or so
the cops at the local station house told themselves. The trains pulling in from
nearby Paris would not be bringing hordes of day trippers to the chateau of
Marie Antoinette, France's last queen, as they do at the height of summer. Not
that the tourists brought crime to the town, but their coaches did snarl up
traffic, and pickpockets were prone to try their luck in front of the palace. It
was also a cool, rainy day and the town's street markets would not attract many
shoppers. There would therefore be few rogue street vendors to round up.
Boulevard de la République, a street lined with trees and
elegant Belle Époque era townhouses, and only a few blocks from the magnificent
chateau, was indeed quiet as a small white police automobile, its red light
turned off, drove up to Number 20, one of six three-storied brick and stone
terraced houses. The uniformed cop and his passenger, a young man, knocked
several times at the house's front door. This was the second visit the young
man, Marc Pavageau, 18, was making to the house that day.
On his first visit Marc had also knocked: Then, the door
had remained closed. Would it remain closed again?
Marc's mother was missing, or rather, two days previously,
on Tuesday, September 28, she had, on setting off for work, told him that she
would not return until 5.30 p.m.; she would be going shopping after work. She
had not returned home at all. Home was in the town of Fourgueux, nine miles (15
kms) from Versailles.
 |
Roxanne Pavageau
|
As Marc had explained to the police earlier, his parents
were separated. His 52-year-old mother, Roxanne, was American; she hailed from
Washington, D.C. She taught English at the international high-school, the Lycee
International, in the town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. His father, Philippe
Pavageau, 50, an international marketing consultant, lived in Versailles, there
at Number 20 Boulevard de la République. With him lived his lover, Barrie
Taylor, 43, also an American. Taylor, he had told the police, was a lawyer; she
had practiced law in the United States. (Versailles, Fourgueux and Saint-Germain-en-Laye
are all in the prosperous Yvelines département (county), south-west of
Paris, half-an-hour by road or rail from the capital.)
Marc had been searching for his mother since Tuesday
evening when she had failed to return home. He had telephoned the school, his
two older siblings – 23-year-old Laurent and 21-year-old Elizabeth – as well as
friends and acquaintances, but no-one had seen or heard from his mother. His
father was on a business trip in New York, so it was unlikely he would know
where his estranged wife would be. Marc had also phoned hospitals in the county
but none had confirmed the arrival of an American woman. Finally, he had driven
from Fourgueux to Versailles to have a word with Taylor. The door had remained
closed. Yet, his mother's black Fiat Panda was parked a little way up the
street. Finally, he had gone to the police. "Let's not panic," the duty officer
had told him. "We'll send a patrol car to have a look. You can go along."
On this second visit to the house, the door again remained
closed. Trained for all eventualities, the cop peeped through the letter-box
slot and looked down a corridor. It led to the house's back door. The door stood
wide open. Beyond it was a small overgrown garden. Suddenly, a silhouette of a
woman stepped from the garden into the corridor. Immediately, the cop banged a
fist against the front door. A second later the door swung open and there stood
Barrie Taylor. As the police would later describe her, she wore brown slacks and
a man's shirt and her face was covered in sweat, her hands spackled with fresh
soil. No, she said, she had no idea where Roxanne Pavageau could be, and yes,
they could come in, but she was rather busy; she was gardening out at the back.
The cop asked if he could have a look around the house.
Taylor did not appear to like the idea, but she allowed him and Marc in without
a search warrant. There was no sign of the missing woman anywhere in the house.
Next, the cop asked Taylor if they could have a look in
the gardening shed and perhaps in the cellar as well. In France, properties
always have a cellar; it's an old tradition from the days when no home was
without a stock of wine stored under the house.
The cop and Marc did not have to inspect either the
gardening shed or the basement.
As was clear, Taylor had indeed been gardening. She'd been
digging; a shovel lay on top of a heap of wet, fresh earth. She had already
cleared a space of about 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length and 1.6 feet (50
centimeters) in depth. On top of stone steps that led down to the cellar, lay
what she probably intended to bury. It was something big enough to need two
large blue garbage bags to cover it.
The cop walked over to the bags. He motioned to Mark to
step back, but the young man remained at his heels. Rolling back one of the
bags, the search for Roxanne Pavageau was over. So was the life of the mother of
three.
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| Police photo of the garden
where Roxanne Pavageau's body was to be buried. |
Soon, more cops, forensic experts, pathologists, a police
psychologist and several photographers arrived at the house; already it was
entered in the station house's log book as a crime scene. Taylor sat slumped in
a chair in the living-room, agitated but silent. As could be seen, Roxanne
Pavageau's head was bashed in; she was dressed only in underclothes and a green
t-shirt, the t-shirt she had worn on setting off for work two days earlier.
Later, at the station house, Taylor uttered her first
words of explanation for what had gone on at the house. "She came at me. She was
out of control with rage. She had a hammer! She said she'd come to kill
Philippe. Then, she wanted to kill me. It was her life or mine … so I hit her.
It was legitimate defense. I didn't want to kill her!"
That was all she said, all she said she could say; blank
was her mind to anything else that concerned the previous 72 hours.
On Saturday, October 2, another cold and rainy day in
Versailles, Barrie Taylor, having been held for three days at the police station
house, was driven to the local Palais de Justice (courthouse) and handed over to
a juge d'instruction (investigating magistrate) – Judge Jean-Marie Charpier. He
told her he was placing her under provisional incarceration as a murder suspect.
She was booked into Versailles Prison on Rue de Paris, another leafy street,
just a block from the Pavageau house. Under France's 1958 Code of Criminal
Procedure, the case, until then classified as a police investigation, had become
a judicial investigation. It would be Judge Charpier's task to decide whether
there was sufficient evidence to successfully prosecute Taylor for the murder of
Roxanne Pavageau.
What Taylor might not have known was that it was there in
Versailles, on June 17, 1938, on a square outside another of the town's prisons,
Saint Pierre Prison, that France's last public execution by guillotine had taken
place. German-born robber, kidnapper and murderer, Eugène Weidmann, had been
convicted for the murder of five people; one was the New York dancer, Jean de
Koven. Weidmann's dawn beheading had turned into such a manifestation of
hysterical excitement – women tried to dip their handkerchiefs into his blood –
that the then French president, Albert Lebrun, had banned public guillotine
executions. (France abolished capital punishment on October 9, 1981: The last
person to be executed by guillotine was the Tunisian-born Hamida Djandoubi,
convicted for the slaying of his girlfriend.) It was also in Versailles, and on
the same square, that French serial-killer, Henri Désiré Landru, known as the
Modern Bluebeard, was publicly executed in 1922 for having murdered 11 women.
Taylor too would have risked the guillotine once, that was
before 1981, but in 1993, should she be found mentally fit to stand trial, and
she could prove beyond reasonable doubt that she had struck down Roxanne
Pavageau to defend herself against an unjustified attack and that her action
was both necessary for legitimate defense and simultaneous with the attack
against her, and there was no disproportion between her means of defense and the
gravity of the attack against her, then, under Art.122-5 of the French Penal
Code, she would not be held responsible for her deed. She would receive only a
suspended sentence and her victim's children could demand reparation from her.
If, however, she was found guilty of voluntary homicide she would receive a
30-year imprisonment sentence under Art. 221-1 which states: The fact of
voluntarily killing another constitutes murder. It is punished by thirty years
imprisonment. Should she, however, be found guilty of voluntary
"premeditated" homicide – classified as assassination in France – she would
receive a life sentence. Premeditated is defined in Art. 132-72 as:
Premeditation is the plan formed before the action to commit
a particular serious or major offence.
Falling in Love in the Most Romantic City in the World
Compiling Barrie Taylor's history was not all that easy;
the police had to shift through the information she supplied, separating truth
from untruth, while seeking confirmation from their colleagues in the United
States.
Taylor was born in Orange County, California, in March
1950 and she was educated at UCLA; she received her bachelor's degree in 1972.
In 1982 she married a man named Leland Hewitt, a builder and real estate dealer
in Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco, and 30 years her senior. He had passed
away at his home in Topanga Canyon in 1991; his marriage to Taylor had ended in
divorce in the 1980s. In a 2000 interview with Carla Hall of the Los Angeles
Times, Taylor said of Hewitt's death: "The fact that I wasn't there was
something I will never, ever forgive myself for. I don't think I can find a man
that I loved as much."
So where was Taylor when Hewitt died? She was in Paris.
Taylor set off for Paris in 1989. She was 39 and of course
already divorced. She rented a small room and started to learn French. She told
those she met that she was a lawyer and had practiced law back home in the
United States. She supplied various stories on where she had studied law; this
she also did when replying to police questions. She said she studied at Monterey
College of Law – she did attend Monterey College of Law for two and half years
and then she dropped out. She spoke of having followed various legal courses in
England. "I don't represent myself out to be a lawyer, but I know how to do
legal work," she defended her claims in the Los Angeles Times interview.
However, between the time of her marriage in 1982 and her
arrival in Paris in 1989, she had worked at various jobs. She had been the owner
of a store in Boulder Creek, California; she had helped out at a women's
shelter, and once she had been manager of a movie theatre in Santa Cruz
Mountains. Then, in 1991 and already in Paris, she had inherited a small trust
fund from Hewitt.
But how had Taylor supported herself in the expensive
French capital in the two years before she had been able to draw money from the
fund?
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| The Champs-Elysees at night,
an area considered "Pure Gold" for hookers. |
The French police said she was a hooker on Avenue des
Champs-Elysées. She vehemently denied this; the police told her that they have a
list of her regular clients. The Champs-Elysées's best kept secret is that it is
pure gold as far as hookers are concerned. Currently (2008) police estimate that
there are between 200 and 300 hookers operating on the avenue. They are known as
les marcheuses – walkers: Clad in $10,000 Yves Saint Laurent suits and
clutching Prada purses, they walk up and down the avenue in their stiletto
Versace's because if they stand still, they can be arrested for soliciting. For
a young woman arriving in Paris with nothing but a rucksack full of expectations
to live Hemingway and Fitzgerald's way in the most romantic city in the world
and then finding that reality is living in one room over a smelly courtyard,
learning that it is possible to earn between $440 to $2,200 – ₤200/₤1,000:
€300/€2,200 – from a client (police estimated figures) picked up on the
Champs-Elysées, certainly is a temptation. (Further police estimates show that a
hooker can earn up to $7,000 – ₤3,500: €5,000 – a night on the avenue.)
It was either on the avenue or in its vicinity that Taylor
met Philippe Pavageau. It was 1991, her second year in Paris. She was lost,
looking for the Eiffel Tower although she lived nearby in a small apartment. She
carried a map of the city. A man stopped to ask her whether she was looking for
a specific place. She said the Eiffel Tower. He pointed at it; the tower, at
1,063 feet (325 meters), the highest structure in Paris, looms over the city.
There is nothing more sexually exciting to a Frenchman
than a young woman with a street map and a cute accent; Taylor, then blonde,
hazel-eyed and elegantly svelte – petite as the French say – at 5 foot 4
and 115 pounds (1.64 meters and 52 kilos), was offered a lift to the tower, and
then, a drink. She accepted both. According to her, a month later she and
Pavageau were lovers. In April 1992, only months since they met, she moved into
his Versailles house. It was there that he had, until the year before, lived in
loving matrimony with Roxanne and where they had reared their three children.
Pavageau had met Roxanne Foley in the 1960s while he was studying for a master's
degree in business administration at the University of Chicago. She was a fellow
student; she was studying for her master's degree in education. The couple had
married in 1968 in Washington, D.C., her hometown.
Taylor's life went up in comfort and social status by
several notches once she was living at Number 20 Boulevard de la République.
Versailles (pop. 89,000) is a bourgeois town; there, she could watch television
on cold winter nights, dine by candlelight in the garden on warm summer
evenings. She could take the fast suburban train to the capital to shop for
designer purses at Galaries Lafayette department store. And never would she have
to worry over where the money for the next month's rent was to come from.
But Roxanne Pavageau did not like the presence of Taylor
in her estranged husband's life. She also didn't like that this compatriot of
hers – she had met her and believed she was a lawyer – was getting on well with
her three children. She might also not have taken to the idea of another woman
living in her house and using her things. There was some silverware she
particularly didn't want Taylor to use; she had asked for it to be handed over
to her or she would fetch it herself. In May 1993, she had gone to the house and
Pavageau had filed a complaint at the local station house against her for having
broken into the house.
Taylor didn't calm the issue of the angry estranged wife.
That September of Roxanne's death, the two women had pulled up side by side at a
red traffic light and Taylor had turned down the window to shout, "We're
enjoying the silverware immensely!"
Roxanne was only a few days from having her head bashed
in.
Beginning to Remember What Happened
 |
| Barrie
Taylor |
At first, Taylor stuck to her claim of partial amnesia.
French psychologists and neuroscientists accept amnesia, full or partial, as a
genuine medical condition caused by a traumatic experience. They also recognize
self-deception and shoehorning as genuine phenomena in murder cases. Taylor
appeared to suffer, or rather take refuge, in all three. She was not a lawyer,
yet she claimed to be: Self-deception. The explanation she was giving for her
attack on Roxanne: Shoehorning – she was fitting her own version of the attack
into police conclusions. As for her partial amnesia: Normally, memory returns,
the French experts say. It may take a few hours, a few months, perhaps years to
do so, but it is a condition that can be reversed.
Taylor's memory started to return. Gradually.
She told the police that she could remember having run
from the house to a nearby phone call box. She had dialed 17, France's
nationwide emergency number. Before anyone could reply, she, frightened, had
hung up. Then, she had gone back to the house to get the car to drive to a
friend's house. The friend, a man, had returned to Number 20 Rue de la
République with her. She refused to name him. She had waited outside in the car
while he had gone into the house; she had told him that Roxanne was somewhere in
the house, hiding and ready to kill her. When he took a little long to reappear,
she had gone into the house too. "I finally went in and as you go up the steps,
I saw her lying on the floor. I just started crying," she told the Los
Angeles Times. She had then covered Roxanne's face with a scarf: A silk
scarf it was, she remembered.
Taylor's friend had apparently got the hell out of the
place. Failing to report a crime and failing to come to the assistance of a
person in danger are punishable felonies in France, but the police did not
pursue the matter of Taylor's friend.
Quickly, Taylor had more details to give the police about her movements in the
48 hours between Roxanne's death and the cop and Marc Pavageau coming to the
house.
She remembered that she had been pregnant but the shock of
having found a dead Roxanne in the house caused her to miscarry.
She also remembered having gone shopping. She could even
remember that she had gone to Paris to hand in camera films to be developed.
Nothing else about the 48 hours could she remember,
however. There was no recall of undressing Roxanne's body, wrapping bin-liners
around it, getting the body to the garden and digging a hole. Neither could she
remember cleaning up the house to wash away blood. Or what she had done with the
so-called hammer. Speaking of her arrest in the Los Angeles Times interview she did though remember that she "apparently" had a shovel in her hand
when the police had turned up.
French law is slow and an accused can spend three or four
years behind bars awaiting trial. Taylor's case was not to be an exception to
the rule. She watched the days, weeks and months pass from her cell window;
initially in Versailles Prison, then in Fresnes Prison, seven miles (12.2 kms)
south of Paris.
She saw her first year behind bars roll into a second,
then a third, then a fourth.
On Wednesday, May 20, 1998, four years and eight months
after her arrest – and still awaiting trial – her lawyer, Maître Francis
Triboulet, successfully petitioned for her release on control order for health
reasons. She weighed only 86 pounds (39 kilos) and she had tried to commit
suicide several times. (In France a lawyer is addressed as "maître.")
The court confiscated Taylor's passport and she was to
report to the police daily. This she did for a few weeks, then, she went to the
United States Consulate on Place de la Concorde in Paris and asked for a
replacement passport. As she told the Los Angeles Times, "When the
embassy asked, ‘What happened to your passport – lost or stolen?' I said, ‘It
was taken by the police.' Asked by the embassy clerk what she planned to do
about that, she replied that she planned to sue France.
Taylor would not again report to the police; the Embassy
issued a new passport and she took the first plane back to the United States.
When the Versailles police realized she'd made a runner, she was already back in
California. She did though try to explain her flight in a letter to the
Versailles court. "Ms Pavageau lost her life after she broke into my home in a
state of rage and tried to kill me. There was no murder. I defended my life,"
she wrote.
France immediately requested Taylor's extradition: two
years previously, on April 23, 1996, an extradition treaty with the United
States had been signed. The French authorities knew that the United States
government hardly ever extradited a national – France also did not like to do so
– but they were not going to let Taylor get away with murder. "She was found in
the house. The body was on the premises. She was digging a hole in the garden,"
said one of the investigating police officers. They had their "corpora delicti."
Taylor decided to fight extradition. She moved to Santa
Cruz County. Then, she settled down in a condominium in Capitola close to
Capitola Mall. To her aid came Professor Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern
University. He prepared to appeal to the European Commission on Human Rights
based in Strasbourg, France. He wanted France to drop the murder accusation
against her. He claimed that her human rights had been violated by the French
judiciary. Not only had she been held in prison too long but the conditions
under which she had been held were appalling: The interpreter she was given was
incompetent, and her medication for depression and anxiety had been taken away
from her. She had also been repeatedly raped. The rape accusation she confirmed
in the Los Angeles Times interview. She said she was raped in the
showers by the other women; she was raped "with things." She also claimed that
the French examining magistrate had refused to shake her hand. "I do not shake
hands with assassins, and certainly not an American," Judge Charpier allegedly
had told her. Taylor might not have been aware that for security reasons in
France a law official, even if only a patrol cop, never shakes the hand of
anyone while on duty. Similarly, during interrogation, a suspect, witness or
claimant always sits with his/her back right up against a wall, and never is he
or she to sit or stand within touching distance of the interrogating law
official.
Meanwhile, while D'Amato was preparing Taylor's dossier
for the European Commission on Human Rights, Judge Charpier, continued with his
investigation and in December 1998, he decided that he had gathered sufficient
evidence to bring Taylor to trial. Yet, another 18 months were to pass before
the trial came to be heard at the Versailles court. On Friday, June 23, 2000,
almost seven years since Roxanne's death, a judge announced Taylor guilty and
she was sentenced in absentia to 30 years in jail. The trial, attended by the
victim's three children, but not by their father, had lasted exactly two hours.
The court had rejected the explanation Taylor had given the Versailles police
that she had hit Roxanne in self defense. "Roxanne Pavageau was hit 20 times at
least, maybe 21 or 22 times. Maybe 25 times. That's not defending oneself.
That's murder," a police officer remarked to journalists.
Something Professor D'Amato had told U.S. journalists
could have been interpreted as his agreement with the above remark. "She didn't
just kill the lady, she butchered her. She struck her many times," he said. But
he had found extenuating circumstances. He compared her action to that of a
battered wife. "You want to make sure they're really dead," he said. "Barrie was
totally appropriate in trying to defend herself, but then she went into
overkill."
Although the Versailles prosecution team had sentenced
Taylor to 30 years, it had failed to establish what exactly had happened between
the two American women on the morning of the slaughter. Neither had the team
succeeded in establishing how a woman of such small build as Taylor could have
moved the larger Roxanne from the house to the garden. It had though, through
forensic tests, established that Roxanne had been sitting when most of the
hammer blows hit her. And, because of an abundance of blood residue in the
house's dining room, that that was where the attack had taken place.
Taylor, at the time of her sentencing was still fighting
extradition in California. Then, on Saturday, November 20, 2003, she was
surprised by the arrival of federal marshals at her Capitola Mall home. She was
arrested and incarcerated in Dublin Prison, outside San Francisco.
For almost all of the following four years, Taylor
continued to fight extradition from her prison cell. She went through four
lawyers. At times she defended herself.
Finally, in October, 2007, U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth
Laporte approved Taylor's extradition to France.
The judge had already in November 2005 ruled that Taylor
was to be extradited, but Taylor's fourth lawyer, John Philipsboro of San
Francisco, had requested that the U.S. State Department look into her physical
and mental health. He claimed she had still not recovered from the inhumane
conditions of French prisons. Conclusion of the case was further delayed because
the French had to provide the State Department with proof that it had
jurisdiction, that the crime fell within the extradition treaty France had
signed with the United States and that Taylor had murdered Roxanne Pavageau, and
they were slow in doing so.
In 2007, Philipsboro, learning that he had lost his case
and that Taylor was to be extradited after all, said that he was all the same
pleased that the 17-page "Certificate of Extraditability and Order of
Commitment" drawn up by Judge Laporte, sited the issue of Taylor's poor health,
her age (she was 53 then) and that she might not receive a fair trial back in
France.
At that time, Taylor also lost her case against France at
the European Commission on Human Rights. Should she somehow be successful in
reversing the extradition, she would never ever again be able to set foot in
France or any other country that's a member of the European Union without
instant arrest and incarceration.
On Friday, October 26, 2007, accompanied by U.S. marshals,
Taylor arrived back in France. She landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport at Roissy,
north of Paris. French newspapers reported that she had tried to kill herself
during the flight.
Taylor was driven to Fleury-Mérogis Prison, 16 miles (25
kms) south of Paris. She was to have a new trial. Maître Olivier Morice, the
lawyer representing Roxanne Pavageau's three children (Marc had turned 33,
Elizabeth 36, and Laurent 38) told journalists, "They (the children) are waiting
for her to explain her crime." He added that the three would also like to know
who this American woman really was; this woman who had claimed she was a lawyer,
when she had in fact lived a "life of charm" in Paris.
No time was lost bringing Taylor to justice this time. Her
second trial opened at the Versailles court on Monday, April 7, 2008 – a mere
five months and one week after her return to France. Summing up for the
prosecution, Chief Prosecutor Anne-Marie Chapelle requested a 20-year sentence.
"We still do not know when, how and why Barrie Taylor killed Roxanne Pavageau,"
she said. She added that Roxanne had not died instantly; it must have taken her
at least an hour to breathe her final breath.
Psychiatrists who had examined Taylor had diagnosed her as
"hysterical and perverse" and "quick-tempered" and "capable of violent emotional
unloading."
Roxanne Pavageau, on the contrary, was described as
someone who had been "optimistic, positive and always wanted to help others."
On Friday, April 11, yet again a cold and wet day in
Versailles, a jury found Taylor guilty of voluntary homicide. She was sentenced
to18 years in prison. She was driven back to Fleury-Mérogis Prison.
After the trial, Maître Morice, speaking on behalf of the
Pavageau children – all three married with children of their own – said that
they felt a great sense of relief that their mother's assassin had finally been
judged, that she had been found guilty and that she would spend 18 years behind
bars. They had been present in the courtroom on the five days of the trial.
Philippe Pavageau, 65, retired and no longer living in Versailles, had again not
attended the trial. Back in 2000 when the Los Angeles Times had
interviewed Taylor, all that Pavageau would say when the paper contacted him in
Paris and asked for a comment was, "The very fact that seven years after the
tragedy we're still talking about, is, in fact, a tragedy." He added that he
would like to know, "Why did Roxanne come by again after having left that house
two years before and what happened when Barrie and Roxanne were together to
trigger such a tragedy?"
Number 20 Rue de la République is now home to another
French family. They love their house.
Women in Jail in France
 |
|
Versailles Prison
|
There are 192 prisons in France; 63 can take women.
Another seven prisons will open this year (2008). On June 1, 2008, Ministry of
Justice statistics showed that 63,838 people were being detained. Of this number
2,286 were women. Prison staff numbered 32,000 with 23,600 of these being prison
guards. The ministry's annual budget for prisons for 2007 was €2.4 billion ($3.8
billion: ₤1.9 billion).
Versailles Prison where Taylor was first held used to be a
refuge for poor women in the mid 18th century. It became a prison in
the 1860s and was modernized in 1985.
Fresnes Prison was inaugurated in the latter part of the
19th century. It's layout of long blocks instead of the traditional
star-shape of prisons, was considered revolutionary; Riker's Island Prison, near
La Guardia Airport in New York, is based on Fresnes' layout.
 |
Fleury-Merogis Prison
|
The 180-hectare Fleury-Mérogis, where Taylor serves her
sentence, dates from the 1960s and is hailed as "modern." The women's wing was
inaugurated in 1964. Sixty-eight percent of the female inmates are foreign: Most
are Algerians, Angolans, Bolivians, Brazilians, Filipinos, Nigerians and South
Africans. "All women arrested at Paris's airports of Charles de Gaulle and Orly,
either on smuggling charges or as illegal immigrants, end up here," one of the
staff revealed. As for the other female inmates, most are serving sentences for
having been accomplices to crimes committed by spouses or lovers. A few are
political prisoners. As inmates are allowed to wear their own clothes, the "politicals"
have red labeling on theirs. This is to make it easier for the guards to
identify them in order to keep an eye on them when they are not in their cells
because contact between them is forbidden.
Fleury-Mérogis does not have a separate wing for minors,
but it does have quarters for mothers with babies. A baby may remain with its
mother until the age of 18 months. Women, pregnant on arrival, can give birth in
prison. As one of four women in a French prison is under 25, and one in two is
under 30, each year at least 50 women are pregnant at the commencement of their
incarcerations. Official statistics do not specify the number of births per
prison, but it is estimated that at least six babies are born in Fleury-Mérogis
annually.
An average cell for triple occupancy is 118 sq. ft. (11
sq. meters). The sleeping bunks are superimposed. Each cell has a toilet seat
and a washbasin. The women have hot running water, something male inmates do not
have.
Taylor is able to shop at the prison canteen. She may
borrow books from the prison library. Her letters, both those she writes and
those she receives, will not be censored; a 1983 French law recognizes the right
of unimpeded correspondence for convicted inmates as well as those still
awaiting trial. She may have a radio. She may have a television in her cell, but
it will cost her a few Euros a month. She may work; inmates do sewing and
embroidery, make and address envelopes, bind books, make and repair toys and so
on, but it is not compulsory to work. She may also study; as such a large
percentage of inmates is foreign, there are daily French language classes she
may attend. She may clean and cook. And if the French Parliament passes a law
proposed by the Minister of Justice, then she will in future receive a monthly
benefit of €67 ($106 : ₤54).
The French Parliament has already agreed on another
proposal from the Minister of Justice. This is to refit all France's prisons.
The cost will be €400 million ($632 million: ₤320 million).
However, the refit is only to commence in 2012.
Barrie, with a little bit of luck, could then be back in
the United States.
As she has already spent over four years - from October 2,
1993 to May 20, 1998 - in prison in France, as well as four years – from
November 2003 to October 2007 – in prison in the United States, a total of eight
years, she could be paroled in or by 2012. But, should she be a well-behaved
inmate, or should her health decline alarmingly, she might well walk free,
without the media knowing anything about it, in a couple of years. Roxanne
Pavageau, on the other hand, will remain dead.
