“She's not dead, you have to finish her.
“A business manager is on trial from Monday at the assizes of Seine-et-Marne in Melun for a failed assassination of his wife during a picnic.
On the evening of Sunday June 4, 2017, Philippe Goncalves, 34, takes his wife for a picnic in the grounds of the Château de Champs-sur-Marne when leaving their congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, a rigorous movement regularly accused of sectarian aberrations .
Married for thirteen years, the couple is going through some turmoil.
The flirtation of this founder of a construction company with a young employee triggers fits of jealousy in his wife, who crosses paths with her rival when she comes to the premises to do the accounting.
That evening, she thinks, her husband is organizing this excursion to finally give her a present, which she insistently demands as a token of affection.
In the vast wooded park, the duo settles in a “cosy” place, out of sight.
A simple 15-day ITT for a bullet in the head
The dinner consumed, Philippe Goncalves suddenly declares having "forgotten the gift" and returns to the car to fetch it.
His absence lasts about fifteen minutes, to the point that his wife begins to worry.
Finally back, her husband offers her a bottle of perfume.
For another quarter of an hour, they converse innocently, reading the Bible on their mobile phones.
It is then that the entrepreneur announces that he has a second gift.
To preserve the surprise, he asks his wife to turn around.
She runs, kneels, turns her back on him… and takes a bullet in the head.
By incredible luck, the projectile fractured the cranial box but without perforating it, not hitting the brain, which was intact.
The victim gets away with an ITT of 15 days.
When she regains consciousness a few minutes later, she sees her husband tumbling out of the woods, presenting a minor gunshot wound to the shoulder.
“We were shot at!
he shouts at her.
To the police who arrived on the spot, the man tells that they were the target of shots coming from the thickets and that his bag and his coat were stolen from him.
But his story, changing, immediately arouses suspicion.
" To scare someone "
Investigations on his phone lead to a certain Sami M., a 23-year-old young man who does odd jobs.
Obsessed with girls and money, he plays the boss by boasting of having contacts in the Parisian "mafia".
Arrested a year later, he revealed to the police that he had been hired by Philippe Goncalves to "scare someone", denying any prior knowledge of an assassination plan.
According to his confession, on the evening of the events, the Jehovah's Witness came to pick him up at the entrance to the park when he pretended to have forgotten the gift, then showed him a hiding place in the bushes.
After a quarter of an hour, he sees Philippe Goncalves come running back, at the very moment when a woman's cry is heard.
"She's not dead, you have to finish her," says the entrepreneur, who seems surprised.
Shocked, his sidekick refuses.
Handing him the gun, Philippe Goncalves asks him to shoot him in the shoulder to disguise this assassination attempt as an assault.
The sidekick complies.
The boss then gives him his bag and the weapon, which Sami M. is responsible for destroying.
Detained, the main defendant, "extremely intelligent and manipulative" according to the employee with whom he flirted, continues to deny the facts of which he is accused.
His possible motive remains nebulous, but could find its source in marital tensions.
Among Jehovah's Witnesses, divorce does in fact risk excommunication for members of the community.
There is only one way, therefore, to form a new couple: to be a widower.
Philippe Goncalves and his alleged accomplice face life imprisonment.
They pretended to be a delivery man and driver and extorted their victims
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