March 8, 2009
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Grègory
Villemin, age 4 |
GRÈGORY
by
Anthony Davis
Grègory Villemin would have been 29 years old this year
and probably like his parents before him happily married, with a good job
and a nice house. Instead, an infinitely more cruel fate was reserved for him:
On Tuesday, October 16, 1984 his body, tied hand and foot, was found floating in
the River Vologne. He was only 4 years old.
As if this wasn't shock enough for the 1,000 inhabitants
of the village of Lèpanges-sur-Vologne (Vosges, north-eastern France), a second
murder was to follow a mere five months later.
So many rumors, contradictions distortions of the truth
have beset the case that it is difficult picking one's way through the files,
news reports and books written on the subject to determine what was fact and
what supposition, malicious gossip or plain lies.
Grègory's parents, Jean-Marie, 27, and Christine, 25, had
done well for themselves. He was a foreman in a local factory, Autocoussin,
specializing in manufacturing top-of-the-range automobile seats, she a
seamstress and section head of a clothing workshop. They had recently built a
large, new house on the outskirts of the village beside a charming wood and had
a handsome, almost pretty, son who was the light of their lives.
In French rural villages, as in small towns all over the
world, passions run deep: jealousy and resentment at others' good fortune count
for almost as much as pride in family possessions (measured in land, no matter
how meager and barren the plot). Murder, when it occurs, is usually found within
the family circle.
The Villemin clan was pre-eminent in Lèpanges, forming a
sort of blue-collar elite, members of which tended to get the best jobs. Many of
the inhabitants were related (cousins, in-laws), but Christine Villemin was an
exception. She had come from another village in a different valley, considered
inferior on the social scale, and she had never been accepted by the clan. They
saw her as trying to better herself by marrying into their circle, a resentment
that increased as she and her husband began to display every sign of relative
economic success.
Three years earlier, Jean-Marie Villemin had received
promotion to foreman in his factory and this, along with his perceived social
climbing and authoritarian demeanor, earned him the nickname of le Chef
("the chief," or "Mr. Big").
For local people the killing, although shocking, was
unsurprising and merely the inevitable result of social tensions that had been
building up in recent years. The most apparent manifestation of such underlying
unease had been a series of threatening phone calls
(and four letters) from a corbeau (crow: a name given originally
to a writer of poison-pen letters, nowadays also applied to malicious telephone
callers.)
These messages, which started in April1981 (two months
after Jean-Marie's promotion), were sent mostly to the Villemin household (and
even to Mr. Villemin's workplace) but some were also received by his parents.
Generally the corbeau issued menaces against Grègory, but on one occasion
threatened to rape Villemin's wife.
There seems little doubt that Jean-Marie and Christine
Villemin were also instrumental in distancing themselves socially. One example
of this was that when they had the telephone installed in their new house they
gave the number to only a small circle of family and close friends.
Even though nobody could identify the gruff disguised
voice, it was apparently someone close to the family as he (or she?) knew
intimate details of Jean-Marie and Christine's lives. He knew, for example, that
Grègory called his Uncle Bernard "Popof," and was well-informed on past and
present family squabbles.
The gendarmes advised members of the family receiving the
calls to tape-record them to help identification, but no one thought to get the
telephone company to trace where the calls were being made from.
The final, horrifying message came at 5:32 p.m. on October
16 to Michel Villemin, Grègory's uncle, at his workplace: A raucous voice
declared, "I have taken the chief's son and put him in the Vologne."
The next day Grègory's parents received an anonymous
letter saying: "I hope you die of sorrow, chief. Your money won't give you back
your son. Such is my vengeance, you bastard."
For the Villemins, the day had been like any other. Both
parents had been at their work. Christine left work at 4:53 p.m., picked up
Grègory as usual from his child-minder and arrived home at 5:03 p.m. While she
got on with some ironing, the boy was playing happily in the sand-box in the
front yard. Although it was fall, the day was warm and sunny and the front of
the house was shuttered against the heat.
It wasn't until around 5:15 she noticed he was missing.
After searching the immediate area she returned to the nanny's house to ask if
she had seen the boy. Meanwhile, a quarter-hour later, Jean-Marie's brother
Michel received the final telephone call confirming Gregory's kidnapping and
death from drowning. The voice was the same as that in the previous threatening
calls.
After notifying the gendarmerie, Michel and Jean-Marie
searched the woods behind the house for an hour: a curious action since the
corbeau had said that he had thrown the boy into the river. Or did Michel
only recall this vital information later?
A hasty search was set up by the gendarmerie and at 9:15
p.m., four hours after his disappearance, Grègory's lifeless body was found in
the River Vologne at Docelles, five miles from Lèpanges
The case predictably hit the headlines and stayed there.
The story had all the elements of a press bonanza adorable child, grieving
parents, poison-pen letters, a number of possible suspects and before public
interest could wane there occurred an extraordinary sequence of events to grip
their imagination. Fed by media hype, the French public was seized with passion
and quickly and irrationally took sides in the affair.
The next day Lèpanges-sur-Vologne was under siege.
Journalists bargained for photos of the child, sought interviews with anyone
willing to speak to them and put pressure on the bereaved father to name the
person he suspected. Newspaper reporters trampled over each other to get the
best angle. The press even offered the Villemins money (which they refused) for
permission to photograph the boy in his tiny coffin.
Meanwhile, the legal procedure had to be put in motion. A
juge d'instruction (magistrate charged with organizing preliminary
inquiries) was appointed: Jean-Michel Lambert, 33, who soon earned himself the
nickname of le petit juge (the little judge), partly on account of his
short stature and boyish looks, but also because in French the epithet petit
can also mean "not very good," in, other words a "nickel and dime" guy.
He considered this an internal affair and supposed that
there was a direct link between the malicious phone calls by the corbeau and the
crime that he (she) had threatened, and instructed the local gendarmes
(rural police) to pursue their investigations along this line.
In his first statement to the press Lambert said that in
his opinion, "
this is a simple affair." He was later to regret that facile
boast.
Inexperienced, he soon showed himself unequal to dealing
with such a complex and high-profile case. In order to bring simmering
journalists into some sort of rational approach, he gave daily press
conferences. Normally, these should have been restricted to progress reports on
the investigation, which leads were being followed up by the gendarmerie,
requests for witnesses to come forward and so on.
Instead, he was coaxed by reporters into indiscretions
such as releasing the names of witnesses and suspects. He even appeared on radio
and TV chat shows and soon appeared to consider himself as one of the leading
actors in a drama.
Not only did he break the rules concerning the
confidentiality of the case, but failed to follow the correct legal procedures
or did so too little and too late such as inaccurate filing of vital documents
or their incorrect ratification. His indecisiveness and lack of experience did
not help matters.
These errors were exacerbated by the sloppy work of other
officials who should have known better. The medical examiner, for example, on
the presumption that Grègory had indeed died from drowning, did not examine the
victim's lungs, stomach or intestines to determine the fact. As a result, a
rumor started that the water in the boy's lungs was not river water but from
another source, thus suggesting that he had been drowned before being thrown
into the River Vologne. The cause of death was therefore never officially
established.
A prime suspect was Jean-Marie Villemin's cousin, Bernard
Laroche, 29, who lived at the village of Aumontzay, two miles from Lèpanges. He
was known to be jealous of his cousin's success and Christine revealed that he
had once made sexual advances towards her. In 1976 he had married Marie-Ange
Bolle, now 27, and they had a son (born 10 days after Grègory) who was partially
handicapped and needed constant care.
Laroche, whose mother and father had both died when he was
young, had, in fact, been brought up by Jean-Marie Villemin's parents, thus the
two cousins had grown up together. Despite their closeness, Jean-Marie had once
refused Bernard's request for a job at Autocoussin even though, now that he was
a foreman, a recommendation from him would have carried some clout with the
boss.
Another early suspect was Jean-Marie's own brother,
Michel, who had also received (he claimed) at least one call from the corbeau. It was common knowledge that Michel was envious of his brother and investigators learned that only two days before the murder
Michel and his wife had visited the Villemin's in their new house the first
time in ages that the two couples had met socially and that Jean-Marie had
taken great pleasure in showing them around the house, the leather sofa, the
modern kitchen . . . could this, they wondered, have been the trigger for the
killing?
Like Lambert and the gendarmerie, the press was
convinced that this was a family affair and armed with information
unwittingly leaked by Judge Lambert they indiscriminately interviewed
potential witnesses even before the authorities had been able to question
them. And so a farcical situation arose in which the general public probably
knew as much about the case as did the investigators. Given the stifling
atmosphere in which they had to work, one can see why le petit juge was overwhelmed by the affair, even
though he had been partly responsible for the fiasco.
A handwriting expert from Paris, Mme. Marie-Jeanne
Berichon-Seyden, was called in to compare examples of the handwriting of members
of the Villemin family and neighbors with that on the corbeau's notes and she
concluded that there was a strong probability that Bernard Laroche had written
the letters.
More importantly, she noticed that on one of the letters,
evidently taken from a note-pad, there was the faint imprint from the previous
note where the writer, using a ballpoint pen, had left some pressure traces. If
the author of the upper note could be identified then the corbeau would have
betrayed himself (or herself).
The task of examining the imprint was handed to Denis
Klein, a gendarme with expertise in that line, and using special laser
equipment he was able to distinguish a signature at the bottom of the note the
letters B. L. Of all the suspects, only Bernard Laroche had those
initials.
Another expert considered that the majority of recorded
telephone calls from the corbeau matched the voice of Bernard Laroche.
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Marie-Ange Laroche
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Laroche and his wife Marie-Ange were called in for
questioning, but in the absence of a confession they were released without
charges being made.
But why Bernard's wife as well? Because after the news of
the murder had spread, she had telephoned the gendarmes from a public
phone booth even though she had a phone in the house to denounce an elderly
couple, the Hollards. She had also taken a very active interest in early
inquiries behavior that arouses the suspicions of police anywhere in the world
and had not gone to work either the day of the murder or the day after, even
though she was clearly not ill. In fact, for her employers (a factory in
Gerardmer, 12 miles away) this was the last straw and she was sacked for
absenteeism, having taken 100 days off in the past year!
What had she been doing during the days she was absent
from work? Investigators were also intrigued as to why she had begged Ginette
Villemin, Michel's wife, not to reveal the close friendship between them and the
Laroches.
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Murielle
Bolle
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During the interrogation of witnesses, Marie-Ange's sister
15 year old Murielle Bolle told the investigating gendarmes that
Laroche had collected her from school in his automobile the afternoon of the
murder, saying he had a job for her. According to her, they picked up Gregory
from his front yard then drove to the nearby village of Docelles and parked at
an isolated spot beside the River Vologne.
Investigators initially presumed that Murielle's part had
been to keep the boy quiet and make sure he was not alarmed: as close a
relative, he was thought to have known the pair well. In fact Murielle claimed
that this was the first time she had ever seen the little boy and when
investigators realized that she in fact lived with her sister and brother-in-law
as a sort of nurse to their son it became apparent that her presence there was
not so much to look after Grègory but to keep calm Bernard's mentally
handicapped son Sèbastien, who had also been in the automobile.
After parking the vehicle, Laroche had told Murielle to
stay where she was while he went off with the boy. She remembered that he had
called the boy "Grègory," the first time she had known his name. Laroche
returned alone.
When shown his photograph, Murielle formally identified
Grègory as the boy her brother-in-law had taken away. Further suspicion was
thrown on Laroche when it was learned from his parents that Grègory was a timid
boy who would not have gone willingly with someone he didn't know. He was fond
of his uncle however.
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Bernard Laroche at his
arrest
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On the Monday, November 5, Murielle Bolle repeated her
story to le petit juge and he ordered the gendarmerie to arrest Laroche. They
did so at his place of work, while still in his overalls, in front of a crowd of
journalists. After a brief interrogation he was charged with kidnapping and
murder and held in custody.
The press splashed the news on the front pages, leaving
their readers in no doubt that the killer had been found and that the motive was
jealousy.
As for Lambert, he announced to TV cameras, a modest smile
on his lips, that the case was solved. The reporters, now that the investigation
was over, prepared to leave Lèpanges the following day.
They were forestalled by a dramatic publicity coup. The
very next morning, Marie-Ange Laroche called in the TV reporters to film her
sister Murielle Bolle, broadcasting live, publicly going back on her previous
version of events, claiming the gendarmes had coerced her. She now asserted that
her original statement had been forced out of her by the gendarmerie under pressure. (In fact the day before she had remarked on how kind they had
been to her.)
Murielle Bolle was of low intelligence; not educationally
subnormal but in a special class for slow learners. She was physically
unattractive, gauche, a loudmouth. For Judge Lambert, she was typical of a
person without any redeeming features who seizes upon the slightest opportunity
to feel important. He therefore discounted her "confession" and accepted its
retraction despite the gendarmes protests that they had put no pressure on her.
The gendarmerie were also furious, believing that Lambert
had made a serious error of judgment in allowing the girl to go back to her
sister's house, suspecting that there had been plenty of time to cook up a story
between the girl, her sister and her brother-in-law.
(Some time later Marie-Ange's sister-in-law, Marie-Therése
Lamboley, revealed that that very evening, Marie-Ange had rough-handled
Murielle, giving her a good shaking and screaming, "Why did you tell them that?"
Murielle, terrified, had run out of the house.)
Contrary to her previous assertion that Laroche had picked
her up in his automobile the afternoon of the murder, Murielle Bolle now claimed
that after she had taken the school bus as usual. She described the driver as
having a moustache and small beard, a description that fitted the regular
driver. However, that day a relief driver had been on duty who was clean-shaven
and wore glasses.
Other witnesses came forward. The school bus driver
insisted that Murielle had not been on his bus the afternoon of Grègory's death.
Two fellow students said that on leaving school they saw her get into a car
driven by a man with a bushy moustache and staring eyes, a description that
fitted Laroche.
Lambert organized a confrontation between Bolle and
Laroche. This is a favorite French judicial ploy, supposedly intended to force
the truth out of one or both parties, though the success rate is disappointingly
low. In this instance, since Bolle had already gone back on her previous
accusations, there was no contest. The investigators learned exactly nothing,
except perhaps that they were as far away from the truth as ever.
Then three women who worked under Christine Villemin came
forward to testify that just before 5 p.m. on October 16 they had seen her
driving off in the direction of the post office, where the last letter of the
corbeau had been mailed, although no one saw her actually post a letter or even
stop there.
The postmark on the envelope gave the time as 5:15 p.m.,
but the investigators did not bother to check with the clerk whether she had
postmarked the envelope immediately when it had been put in the mailbox or 15
minutes later. When questioned, Christine admitted that she had posted a letter
at that time, but on Monday, the day before Grègory's murder. After a thorough
search, the gendarmes traced this letter; it had no connection with the case.
For Judge Lambert, however, the testimony of these three
women was enough to throw suspicion on Grègory's mother and the gutter press
slavishly followed his lead. After all, the story of a mother who murders her
own child is far more marketable than that of a jealous cousin.
New handwriting experts were called in and this time they
found that there was an 80 percent chance that Christine had written the corbeau
letters! Lambert advised her that she was now officially a suspect and subjected
her to nine hours' interrogation. She was by now in the early stages of
pregnancy and collapsed under the strain and was rushed to hospital. Rumor has
it that she lost one of the twins she was supposedly expecting.
There was criticism of the gendarmerie for not having
subjected the Villemins to handwriting tests before, and for not having searched
their house, but they protested that Judge Lambert had not instructed them to
carry out these inquiries.
It was becoming evident that relations between Lambert and
the gendarmes were becoming strained and Captain Sesmat, leading the
investigating team, felt this new lead was preposterous, bearing in mind the
strength of evidence against Laroche.
The gendarmes were also hampered in their job by repeated
procedural failures owing to Lambert's incompetence. Documents on the original
handwriting expertise were declared ineligible for vice de forme, a French legal
expression meaning that there had been flaws in the procedure, such as
interviews carried out and statements being taken without a third party present,
documents incorrectly labeled or added to the case files outside the time limit.
Among the documents which could now no longer be submitted
in evidence included the original handwriting report confirming Laroche as the
corbeau and the expertise carried out by Officer Klein on the imprints
that revealed the initials B. L.
In addition, the tape recordings of the corbeau's
voice had been played back so often that by the time they were produced in court
they were practically inaudible.
Convinced now of Laroche's innocence, le petit juge
against the advice of the district attorney released him on bail February 4,
1985, even though the charges against him were not yet dropped.
Laroche's attorney leaked information of his impending
release to the press and television filmed the emotional reunion with his
family, presenting the event as a triumphant homecoming. The significance of
this incident was not lost on the Jean-Marie Villemin.
Some time previously a journalist, Jean Ker of Paris
Match, had befriended the Villemins and became a sort of avuncular advisor
to them. He claimed to be firmly convinced of Christine's innocence and of
Laroche's guilt. Cynics will no doubt conclude that he had ideally placed
himself for a scoop.
Three weeks after Laroche's release, Ker, who had somehow
got hold of a copy of a recording of Murielle Bolle's accusations against her
brother-in-law, played the tape to Jean-Marie. Predictably he was driven into a
rage at the injustice of his cousin's liberty and, grabbing his hunting rifle,
swore he would have his revenge.
Ker calmed him and got him to swear that he would do
nothing rash. Reassured, he returned to his hotel but, gnawed by doubt, rose
from his bed at four in the morning. He went to Villemins' house and, alarmed at
not seeing their automobile in the drive, immediately made for Laroche's
residence. There he found Jean-Marie outside, gun cocked. Laroche, who was on
night-shift that week, was due to return home shortly.
After some desperate persuasion, Ker managed to talk him
out of any rash act. He did not fail to file an article with his magazine
describing the night's events. Villemin was to later suggest that Ker's probing
had been partly responsible for what followed.
Laroche was now forewarned of the danger he faced, but
despite the clear threat on his life neither Lambert nor the district attorney
took any action to protect him.
Meanwhile, antagonism between Judge Lambert and the local
gendarmerie had reached such a pitch that he took the investigation out of their
hands and handed it over to detectives of the Police Nationale. As
everyone in France knows (except perhaps for Lambert) there is bitter rivalry
between the Gendarmerie (who are in fact a military unit attached to the army)
and the police.
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| Judge Lambert and
Commissioner Corazzi |
The police decided to look at the case from zero and
followed up Lambert's suspicions of Christine Villemin. The officer in charge of
the case, Commissioner Corazzi, wishing to put pressure on her and at the same
time prepare public opinion, used a relative of his who worked for the radio
station RTL to arrange for the news to be broadcast of her imminent arrest.
The Villemins heard this announcement in their automobile,
returning from a Sunday spent with Jean-Marie's parents. The shock to the
pregnant Christine was so severe that she started to hemorrhage and was once
again hospitalized.
It was while she was in her hospital bed that Judge
Lambert formally warned her that she was now the chief suspect in Grègory's
murder.
With his wife hospitalized, accused of the worst of
crimes, while Laroche was free, Jean-Marie Villemin cracked and what had long
been expected happened. Just after midday on March 29 as Bernard Laroche had
left work Villemin suddenly confronted him, hunting rifle at the ready, and shot
him once in the chest. The wound was fatal.
Laroche's last words just before the shot was fired were,
"I didn't kill your kiddie." (This public almost
staged act reminds one of Jack Ruby's assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald. Had
Villemin done it out of revenge, in a fit of uncontrollable rage or to get rid
of a vital witness?)
Before giving himself up to the police he visited the
hospital to tell Christine what he had done. She was now left to face everything
alone, her son dead and her husband under arrest. On leaving hospital, she went
to stay with her parents, but not once did she crack under pressure and gave no
confession whatever.
Then in April, six months after Grègory's murder, Lambert
and his associates claim to have found tire marks near the spot where the boy
was presumed to have been thrown in the River Vologne. Casts were made of the
tires which were said to have been those of a Renault Ami, the model of
automobile owned by Mrs. Villemin.
Following up this "clue," police hopes were dashed
when it was found that she had in fact sold the vehicle three months earlier and
that the new owner had already put in over 1,000 miles. The tread patterns of
the tires did not therefore match.
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| Jean-Marie and Christine
Villemin |
The tire tracks were not deemed sufficient evidence to
charge Mrs. Villemin but then police searching her house found a reel of cord
identical to that used to bind Grègory's hands and feet. This was enough for
Judge Lambert and she was arrested forthwith, July 5, and placed in custody.
Later, faced with the evidence of the cord, she claimed
that Bernard Laroche had given it to them. Neither Lambert nor the police felt
it necessary to search the Laroche home or anybody else's house to see if
other people had similar cord. Nor did they ask themselves why an intelligent
person like Christine, were she the murderer, would leave behind such an
incriminating piece of evidence where it could be easily found.
And her motive? The petit juge put it down to "a fit of
madness." He therefore called in various psychiatrists to examine her. Not one
found anything abnormal about her.
This "simple affair" dragged on without making further
progress and contradictory information clouded matters even more. It seemed that
the more evidence that turned up, and the more witness stories were gathered,
the more difficult it became to apportion blame. The case became tangled in its
own contradictions.
With Laroche now dead, any legal action against him was
annulled. The evidence nevertheless still pointed to him as the most likely
corbeau, kidnapper and murderer. Could Lambert have switched his attention to
Christine Villemin in order to be able to produce another suspect to keep the
case alive?
Certain journalists who could not believe in Christine's
guilt carried out tests to indicate that she did not have the time to commit the
murder. Stop-watches in hand, they traced the route taken by the slayer between
Lèpanges and Docelles and concluded that it was impossible, given the times and
places where witnesses had testified to have seen her.
Unfortunately, the majority of the press followed the
official line and these voices raised in protest were ignored by the
investigators. One influential writer, Marguerite Duras, even wrote an
accusatory article against Christine in the left-wing magazine Libèration
("Sublime, forcèment sublime, Christine V.") which was not only biased
but defamatory.
However, in his book In Love with Duras, Edmund
White wrote:
There was always something preposterous about
(Marguerite Duras). When she was feeling well enough she surrounded herself with
courtiers, laughed very loudly, told jokes, and had opinions about everything.
She was an egomaniac and talked about herself constantly. Almost three years
after her cure [NB for alcoholism] she created a scandal by speculating
recklessly about the most famous (and still unsolved) murder case in recent
French historythe case of little Grègory.
