• Valérie Bacot, 40, is tried from this Monday before the assizes of Saône-et-Loire for having killed in 2017 her ex-father-in-law, who raped her at the age of 12 before becoming her husband and his pimp.

  • Minors at the time of the facts, his two sons and another teenager were tried in December 2020 for helping him bury the body in a wood.

    They were given a six-month suspended prison sentence.

  • Valérie Bacot, she faces life imprisonment.

    The verdict is expected Friday June 25.

On May 29, 2017, Carole G. pushes the doors of the Digoin gendarmerie (Saône-et-Loire). She never dared to talk about it, for fear of reprisals. But she can no longer keep to herself this important information concerning the disappearance of Daniel Polette. His son, Lucas, 17, has been dating Karline for three years, the daughter of this 61-year-old man who has not given any sign of life since March 13, 2016. That day, around 8 pm, the teenager receives a message from Valérie Bacot, Daniel's wife. "That's it, it's done," she wrote. An hour later, she picks up Lucas by car. When he returns the next evening, he confides to his mother that Valérie killed her husband and that with the help of her two sons, Kévin and Dylan, he helped her to bury the body in a wood, near from the lake of the castle of La Clayette.

Five years after the facts, Valérie Bacot, 40, is tried from Monday before the Assize Court of Saône-et-Loire for assassination.

His two sons and Lucas were tried in December 2019 in a children's court in Mâcon.

They were sentenced to a six-month suspended prison sentence for concealing a corpse.

“She is relieved to finally be able to speak out and in a hurry to know the verdict.

But she is also a little anxious because she knows she is going to go to jail.

And she is afraid to leave her children ”, explains to

20 Minutes

her lawyer, Me Janine Bonaggiunta.

For her client, it is a final battle to be waged "against her rapist husband".

A fight that she leads "so that her children can know the truth".

"Dany", violent husband and pimp

Her story, Valérie Bacot told it to the gendarmes who arrested her on October 2, 2017: 24 years of ordeal.

Before being with her, Daniel was his mother's companion.

Teenager, she is abused regularly by this violent and alcoholic stepfather.

Convicted of having sexually assaulted him, he was sentenced in 1995 to four years of detention.

When he gets out of prison, the 18-year-old continues to see him and leaves to live with him after becoming pregnant.

One way, she explains, to escape her alcoholic mother.

Married in 2008, they have four children, three boys and a girl.

But from the birth of the eldest, Daniel begins to hit Valérie, sometimes with a hammer, the threat of death with weapons.

He forces her to go buy him some beer while he watches porn movies in the family living room.

The women who shared Daniel's life do not tell investigators anything else. They remember a violent, brawler, macho, bossy man. One of them explains that he hit her with a brass knuckle, that he once pursued her with a knife and that he threatened their son with a gun.

Daniel controls Valérie's actions and actions.

He has even forced her, for the past fifteen years, to prostitute himself.

For this, he fitted out the back of a Peugeot 806 by installing curtains and a mattress.

He manages appointments by phone: between 20 and 50 euros per pass.

What he loves most of all, Daniel, is watching his wife when she is with a client, giving her instructions through an earpiece.

She is his thing, his sexual object.

He forces her to have sex with women, which turns him on.

He had his nickname, "Dany" tattooed on the scars of his Caesarean section.

Buried in a wood

One day, “Dany” asks his daughter how she is “sexually”. Would he consider prostituting the 14-year-old as well? For Valérie, this is too much. On March 13, 2016, she steals one of her husband's weapons, hides it in the bag she takes to go to a date. In a small wood, on the edge of RN79, she finds her client of the day. Things are going badly. He's brutal, she cries in pain. Daniel is pissed off, he screams. Sitting in the front of the vehicle while she is changing, he does not see Valérie taking the revolver out of her bag, closing her eyes, and shooting her in the back of the neck. By reopening them, Valérie notices that he is dead. She then opens the driver's side door and lets him fall to the ground.

She later returns with Lucas G., then 16, to help him put the body in the car. Back home, she announces the news to her children. With Lucas and her two sons, Dylan, 15, Kévin, 17, she goes to bury Daniel in a forest and makes the murder weapon disappear. On their instructions, the gendarmes found the body in the woods. Close to mummification, it wears an alliance on which is engraved "Valérie 15/11/2008", the date of their marriage.

According to one of the experts who examined her, Valérie Bacot "had acquired the certainty that only this gesture could allow her to protect her children".

He explains his passage to the act by a "feeling of terror" and "his emotional exhaustion because of his permanent hypervigilance".

The examining magistrate recognizes that the violence inflicted by Daniel sheds light on Valérie's personality and the circumstances of her crime.

But the magistrate also stresses that she was not in a situation of self-defense when she killed him: he was disarmed and had his back to her.

On the contrary, she had prepared her gesture, which she had mentioned to her daughter.

Similarities with the Jacqueline Sauvage case

The case is often compared to that of Jacqueline Sauvage, sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for having killed her husband on September 10, 2012 with three shots in the back, before being pardoned.

The two lawyers of Valérie Bacot have also ensured the defense of the one who had become a symbol of domestic violence.

“These cases are only similar on one point: they are domestic violence that had lasted for many years,” emphasizes Me Bonaggiunta.

The big difference is that this woman was first a little girl in the hands of this executioner, since he raped her when she was 12 years old.

"

Valérie Bacot faces life imprisonment.

The verdict is expected Friday June 25.

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  • Sexual violence

  • Assassination

  • Justice

  • Trial

  • Jacqueline Sauvage

  • Violence against women

  • Domestic violence