In December, a court sentenced Dominique Pelicot to twenty years in jail for drugging his spouse Gisèle and alluring dozens of males to their bed room to rape her between 2011 and 2020.
The trial surprised France and turned Mr. Pelicot into France’s most infamous sexual predator. His spouse, Gisèle, turned a feminist icon.
However the police and prosecutors suspect that she was not his first sufferer. “Gisèle Pelicot fears that she herself is simply the tip of the iceberg,” certainly one of Ms. Pelicot’s attorneys, Antoine Camus, mentioned in an interview.
Whereas Mr. Pelicot was in jail awaiting his trial, the police confronted him with DNA proof linking him to the tried rape of a 19-year-old girl within the Paris area in 1999. After hours of questioning, he admitted to drugging her, telling the police, “It’s me.”
He’s additionally being investigated for the rape and homicide of a 23-year-old girl in 1991. Mr. Pelicot has denied any involvement within the homicide. However prosecutors indicted him in 2022 for each crimes, that are so comparable they’ve been folded into one case.
Each victims had been younger actual property brokers within the Paris space. Each had been violently assaulted with a blade, tied up, drugged with ether and the decrease a part of their our bodies undressed. In each crime scenes, the sufferer’s footwear had been discovered neatly positioned within the room.
No trial date has been set.
As we speak Mr. Pelicot, 72, is jailed in southern France, not removed from the village the place he and his spouse, now divorced, had retired. However in 1991, Mr. Pelicot was working as an actual property agent in Paris, and by 1999 had taken a job as a salesman for hearth alarms and phone methods.
The girl who was murdered, Sophie Narme, had been working for a month in her first job as an actual property agent when she was killed.
On the night of Dec. 4, 1991, her employer found her lifeless, partly undressed physique in a top-floor flat she had proven to a shopper earlier that morning within the nineteenth Arrondissement of Paris. The police suspect the shopper was Mr. Pelicot utilizing a false identify.
They detected a robust odor of ether on the crime scene and in the course of the post-mortem. She had been overwhelmed, drugged, stabbed, strangled together with her personal belt and raped, in line with investigation paperwork learn in court docket throughout his trial final 12 months.
Although the crime scene confirmed traces of violence, with the content material of Ms. Narme’s purse scattered throughout the room, her high-heeled footwear had been discovered rigorously positioned subsequent to the corpse.
Eight years later, in 1999, a 19-year-old actual property agent met a potential shopper on the highest flooring of an condominium constructing within the Paris area for what was alleged to be a routine go to to have a look at a rental unit. The shopper, whom the authorities once more suspect was Mr. Pelicot utilizing an alias, requested her to take some measurements within the flat.
As she turned her again, he pinned her to the bottom, pressured her onto her stomach, sure her wrists with a rope and pressed a cloth lined in ether to her nostril, in line with the lawyer for the sufferer, whose identify has not been disclosed. She tried holding her breath as he drugged her.
He took off her high-heeled footwear, rigorously putting them on the facet. She remembered feeling a field cutter towards her pores and skin as her attacker squeezed her throat along with his arm.
“I used to be nonetheless sluggish from the product he’d made me inhale,” the girl instructed investigators in line with case paperwork learn in court docket. “I couldn’t flip round, I bear in mind feeling like a prisoner in my very own physique. I didn’t need him to see that I used to be awake. I felt I couldn’t transfer.”
However the results of the drug quickly wore off, and the sufferer fought off her attacker after which managed to cover in a storeroom for hours, locking it from the within. Her attacker finally left.
The police collected traces of his blood on her footwear and on the carpeted flooring. However for years, they made no progress. In 2011, the case was dropped.
It was solely reopened when it was linked to Narme homicide case.
For the previous 34 years, Florence Rault, the lawyer for Ms. Narme’s mom, had continued to pursue the homicide case, commonly asking the court docket to research items of proof or to discover new leads.
“I used to be doing it for Sophie,” Ms. Rault mentioned. “I made a promise to her mom that we’d get to the top of this story and that she wouldn’t die earlier than figuring out the identify of her daughter’s killer.”
As early as 2004, the police had already made a connection between the 2 instances. However again then, the nationwide system classifying DNA felony data had simply been created and was barely practical.
Traces of sperm discovered on the 1991 crime scene had been misplaced by the forensic institute accountable for analyzing the pattern.
In 2010, Mr. Pelicot was arrested for the primary time for filming up ladies’s skirts at a shopping center within the Paris area, utilizing a digital camera hidden in a pen. He was let off with a superb of 100 euros, equal to roughly $104.
He was caught doing it once more in 2020, in a grocery store within the south of France. However this time, the safety guard inspired the victims to file an official criticism, permitting the police to conduct an investigation.
That’s when the police say they linked Mr. Pelicot’s DNA to the 1999 tried rape.
Ms. Rault is now the lawyer for that case, too. By Ms. Rault, the girl who survived mentioned she had moved on and didn’t wish to discuss publicly concerning the case. She did, nonetheless, interact within the authorized proceedings and confronted Mr. Pelicot in 2023 as a part of the investigation.
By then, Mr. Pelicot had confessed to many particulars of the tried rape. He instructed the police that he had gone to an actual property company in Paris as a result of he needed to get a really feel of his previous job and to take a look at costs for leases.
He mentioned he acted on “impulse,” after assembly the agent and organising an appointment to go to the condominium. He then went again to his automobile to get the rope and what he described as “a product for cleansing headrests” — a bottle of ether.
“I wasn’t planning to have relations together with her,” he instructed the investigating decide, explaining that he drugged her as a result of he needed to have a look at her undressed physique whereas avoiding any violence.
“I attempted to neglect that for a very long time,” he added. “I apologize for mendacity, it was tough to confess.”
His lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, mentioned the assertion to the police didn’t quantity to a “formal recognition” of the crime.
“He acknowledges the materiality of constructing her go to sleep, he doesn’t acknowledge carrying a knife, and he explains that if all this occurred it was not with the first intention of raping her,” she mentioned.
The French media have also reported that the police are trying into two comparable instances from 1995 and 2004, though Mr. Pelicot has not been questioned by the police about them, his lawyer mentioned.
As for the 1991 homicide, Mr. Pelicot has repeatedly denied any connection. “There’s no method he’s going to let go as a result of he actually doesn’t wish to be acknowledged as a killer,” his lawyer mentioned. “As a result of he’s not a killer.”
Catherine Porter contributed reporting.
