Europe 1 with AFP 5:49 p.m., April 17, 2022
A 69-year-old man is accused of killing his partner, before cutting up and burning her body in a forest in Yvelines in 2017. It took two years for investigators to identify the victim.
His companion is accused of having simulated proof of life: SMS, bank withdrawals and others.
A 69-year-old retiree will soon be tried for having killed his partner, whose body was found dismembered and charred in a wood in Vernouillet (Yvelines) in 2017, AFP learned on Sunday from a source familiar with the matter.
The man was returned, on March 18, for murder of a spouse and attack on the integrity of a corpse before an assize court in Versailles.
Contacted, his lawyer did not wish to comment at this stage.
The family "awaits, with great hope, a certain number of explanations from the accused" during the trial, the date of which is not yet known, reacted Me Anne Bouillon, lawyer for the victim's son. .
This case is "emblematic" of feminicides, "that is to say that women die in silence", she denounced.
On August 31, 2017, pieces of burned bodies were found on a pedestrian path in Vernouillet, about forty kilometers west of Paris.
It will take two years for investigators to identify them: they belong to a sexagenarian, reported missing by her companion on October 16, 2017. Her DNA, found at the companion's home in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), on a brush to hair, allows approximation.
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Companion is accused of faking proof of life
The identification was all the more complicated as the companion is accused of having simulated proof of life: SMS, bank withdrawals… For a year and four months, more than 28,000 euros were debited from the account of the deceased. , according to elements of the procedure.
The man made his first confession, before his indictment and his placement in pre-trial detention on October 17, 2019. He said he strangled his companion at home, assuring that she was violent and jealous and had also sought to 'strangle.
He then gave slightly different versions during the investigation.
He also admitted to using a knife and handsaw to dismember the body.
Probably also other tools, such as a mechanical saw, according to the investigators.
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The accused then transported the dismembered body in the night, in bags of rubble, to Vernouillet where he burned it.
The couple had been together since 2016. He, a self-employed taxi driver, had no particular pathology according to an expert.
He was also having a relationship with another woman.
She, 67, described by the expert as having a “depressive” and “impulsive” personality, had shown a tendency to “devalue” herself during stays in a psychiatric hospital.