At dawn on Monday, January 11, 1993, the fire brigade came to put out a fire in a house in Prévessin-Moëns, a small village in France’s Ain department, near the Swiss border. They found the partially charred bodies of a woman and two children, and a badly burned man, who was taken to a hospital in a critical state.
The accident hypothesis lasted no more than a couple of hours. The woman had received blows to the head, the children had been shot, and they’d all been dead for almost two days. The man, Dr. Jean-Claude Romand, had tried to poison himself with barbiturates. A cousin went to tell the horrible news to Romand’s parents, who lived forty miles away in the Jura department. He found them dead, also shot. Finally, a woman who had been Romand’s mistress stated that she had spent Saturday night with him in Paris, and that he had seemed so strange that it had occurred to her that he was going to try to kill her. But she’d stood up to him, she said, and he’d calmed down before heading back home.
The tragic weekend was reconstructed without much difficulty: wife and children murdered on Saturday morning; parents that afternoon; a whirlwind trip to Paris that evening; back to Prévessin in the night; then a twenty-four-hour blank before he poisons himself and lights the fire that was meant to burn the place to the ground.
He went bonkers, as they say. As is often the case when that happens, nothing that was known about him fit in with this fivefold crime: he was thirty-nine but seemed older; calm, collected, cultivated; a doctor who specialized in arteriosclerosis who worked as a researcher for the World Health Organization in Geneva; a considerate father who, their friends said, got along well with his wife; they were a stable and harmonious couple.
In the days that followed there were two surprises. First, Romand didn’t die. He got over his poisoning and his burns. Soon he was well enough to be questioned. Then it was discovered that he wasn’t a researcher at the WHO, that no one there had ever heard of him, that he wasn’t even a doctor. No one in his entourage had so much as suspected him of duplicity, and now it was known to have lasted for eighteen years. It was normal that he hadn’t treated patients because he did research, everyone said, normal that he couldn’t be reached at his office in Geneva because he traveled a lot. What’s more, it was enough to hear him talk with other professionals to see how competent he was in “his” field: he was up-to-date on all the recent research.
Yet all of that was fake. A facade. But what lay behind it? Where did he get the money that had allowed him, year in, year out, to lead the life of the person he was pretending to be? If he wasn’t a doctor, what was he? At the start of the investigation the newspapers had the time of their lives, evoking espionage, money laundering, organ trafficking, and a huge international scam. But it quickly became clear that such leads went nowhere. Romand had led a double life, but the hidden part of this life seemed to have taken place without either accomplices or witnesses, and to have had no other goal than backing up, day after day, the official version. He spent exactly as much energy pretending to be that person as it would have taken to really be him.
Before setting the house on fire he’d scrawled a confused note on the back of an envelope, which the police later found in his car. It mentioned an “injustice,” and a “banal accident” that could “drive you mad.” No one knows what injustice he was referring to, but the banal accident—a fractured wrist—took place in September 1975, and that’s when, without anyone knowing, Jean-Claude Romand’s life headed off in two separate directions that only met up eighteen years later in blood and flames.
Winding back the clock, then, twenty years earlier he’s in second-year med school in Lyon. How to describe his life up to that point? The only child of a forest-ranger couple from the Jura region, he grew up close to nature, a little solitary perhaps but surrounded by love and, according to everyone, affectionate and good-natured. And he’s a good student, too: the pride of his parents, who are delighted to see him becoming a doctor. For some time he’s had a half-sensible, half-passionate relationship with a distant cousin, Florence, also a medical student: a beautiful girl, and a good girl. Their future is laid out for them. The only glitch: he failed his spring-term exams, but he only needs to pass the makeup exam to be readmitted in September.
That’s when he falls down the stairs. Fractured wrist. Whether it was subconsciously deliberate is anybody’s guess. He doesn’t write the makeup exam. He could have chosen to dictate his answers, that’s possible, but he doesn’t. When the results are posted, he says he passed, perhaps because he’s afraid to disappoint his parents and Florence. They’re happy, if not particularly surprised. A minor, childish fib that he doesn’t know will seal his fate, and the fates of his parents, his future wife, and their still-unborn children.
At what moment did it become impossible for him to go back on his lie? No one knows; all that’s known is that he couldn’t. His life starts to take place on two levels, with a fiction that everyone takes for reality, and with the reality that isn’t real for anyone, not even for him.
He does brilliantly at medical school, all the while enrolling again and again in second year. He announces his success in exams he doesn’t write, and no one suspects a thing as the years go by, no one gets the idea of looking for his name on the lists of exam results. He studies, too, attending courses and spending hours in the library. Florence—who’s dropped out of medical school, lowered her sights, and gone into pharmacology without too many regrets—helps him study for his final exams. He doesn’t say anything, because on top of everything else he’s modest, but everyone—goodness only knows how or why—firmly believes he finishes fifth in his class.
In 1980, he and Florence are wedded (that’s true), and he accepts a position as researcher at the WHO (that’s false). To be closer to Geneva, where he’ll now be working, the couple move to Ferney-Voltaire and quickly settle into the community of international functionaries who inhabit this border region, befriending a lot of doctors and researchers. Two children are born, Caroline in 1985 and Antoine in 1987. They’ll be beautiful children, healthy and happy, and outgoing. Everyone likes the family. Their friends think Florence and Jean-Claude complement each other perfectly: She’s tall and beautiful, athletic, extroverted, always in a good mood, even a bit of a joker, and at the same time a model of propriety. He’s more reserved, calmer, but without seeming cold or arrogant. On the contrary, he’s appreciated for his discretion: he doesn’t brag but he could, because scientifically speaking he’s a brain, he’s got huge responsibilities, he goes out to dinner with former ministers and prime ministers, and his name has been put forward for director of the National Health and Medical Research Institute. Again, he’s not the one to let the cat out of the bag, that’s not his style, but word gets out … Physically he’s tall and well built, with a receding hairline, handsome gray-blue eyes, and a soft-mannered smile that inspires confidence.
Romand’s professional life was an illusion, but his family life wasn’t. Everything suggests that his wife and children were happy with him, that he loved them fondly and that they loved him, and that the affection and the tenderness that everyone saw weren’t just a charade. Their house was open to visitors, there was no hidden chamber of horrors. This transparency makes it all the more astonishing that Florence never suspected a thing, that year in, year out, it never occurred to her to go visit him at his office, that she accepted his silence regarding his work, his comings and goings, his hours that were so irregular that she joked innocently in front of everyone that one day she’d find out he was a KGB spy. Hearing that, he’d smile indulgently and take her lovingly by the hand, and everyone present was amazed at how well they got along.
Then what did he do all day? What did he do with the empty hours after he’d dropped the kids off at school, without any role to play, when he was no longer anything at all? He spent them reading in his office—in his car, that is. He read huge amounts: first the newspapers, then scientific texts to keep himself up-to-date, then philosophical and theological works. During his last year of high school he’d written a test on “What’s the truth?” and the question kept nagging at him. Depending on his mood, he spent his time in Geneva or Lyon, or he went walking in the forests of the Jura region, where he’d spent his childhood. Sometimes he’d treat himself to a massage: it was his only human contact in these days of absolute solitude. In the evening he returned to what had become real life for him, the life where he was Dr. Jean-Claude Romand. Then it was the other, secret life that seemed like a dream.
And money? During his studies, his parents had paid for his expenses and bought him a small studio apartment in Lyon. But after that? After that he lived from the confidence he inspired. Since he’d started working for the WHO, his family and his wife’s family were well aware that his status as an international civil servant opened up sound investment opportunities. So, quite naturally, if his relatives sold their home, received a small inheritance or a retirement gratuity, they came to see their son-in-law or brother-in-law Jean-Claude, who invested the money in Switzerland, where—if the tragedy hadn’t happened—everyone would have continued to believe it was peacefully yielding a tidy profit. There was so little talk of anyone asking for it back, its owners seemed so satisfied to know it was in a safe place, that he had almost no qualms about spending it to support himself and his family.
As absurdly simple as it seems, this system worked for more than ten years without a hitch, and in the automatic pilot of his double life, it seems that Romand ruled out as an almost abstract risk the possibility that one day one of his relations would ask to have his or her savings back. In the same way Romand ruled out the possibility of a tax audit (now in his thirties, he continued to declare an income of zero francs as a second-year medical student), or that he or one of his children could fall ill and oblige him to have recourse to the social security system. It would have been enough for someone to ask him for a pay slip, or even to try to reach him at the WHO (and all things considered, it’s incredible that no one did), for him, with one thing leading to another, to be tried for breach of trust, and for five deaths to be avoided. Seen from the outside, his deception would have seemed harmless, a little like someone who uses his ambassador’s physique to mingle with heads of state at international summits. But only from the outside, because to him the truth about his life would have devastated his loved ones literally to the point of killing them, and that was to be avoided at all costs.
This idea must have started to weigh on him more and more in the last year, when his system started to go haywire. He gets involved with a woman named Chantal, although it’s not quite clear whether they’re really in a relationship or if it’s more of a loving friendship. But one thing is for sure: adding marital infidelity to his social duplicity troubles him a lot: a double life squared. Chantal has just broken up with her husband and left Ferney-Voltaire, where she met Romand, for Paris, and sold her dental office, which brought her nine hundred thousand francs. Jean-Claude, her lover and confidant, is immediately tasked with investing it in Switzerland and, although he must know she’ll want it back before long, squanders it all the quicker because he wants to look good in her eyes. Suddenly things start happening fast. For years he’s known abstractly that he’s heading for an abyss, but now he’s on the brink.
As expected, Chantal asks for her money. She needs it to buy a new practice in Paris. He puts it off, hems and haws, comes up with pretexts that she swallows without smelling a rat, but he knows the game is up. He could make himself scarce. Or accept going to prison. Or even kill himself and leave behind a moving note, telling his close ones that he loves them, that he did everything he did because he loved them. But once again the thought of Florence, the children, and his parents finding out that he wasn’t who they thought he was is unbearable to him. He’s sure it would be just as unbearable to them, that it would kill them to discover the truth. They don’t deserve to die like that. At the least they should die without suffering, that is, without knowing.
Christmas comes and goes, followed by New Year’s, in the warmth of family celebrations. Then the last week begins. He buys ammo for the rifle, barbiturates, jerricans full of gas, everything he needs to die together with his loved ones. He watches himself do it in an incredulous stupor. He becomes a murderer the way he became an impostor, knowing all the while that it’s not true, not possible, and at the same time that there’s no turning back. A dreadful logic locks him in his future crime the way it locked him in his lies. On Friday evening the family goes to a nearby shopping center to buy a present for a friend of Antoine’s who’ll celebrate his birthday the next day. They have dinner in a restaurant, talk about school, joke, laugh, then go home early to have time to wrap the LEGO set before going to bed.
The next morning, Jean-Claude watches his wife sleeping. Everything goes blank for a moment, then he’s standing over the bed with a bloody rolling pin in his hand, and she’s dead, her head cracked open. He goes downstairs where his children are watching a video of The Three Little Pigs. He sits down beside them on the couch, hugs them for a moment: they love a good hug, and so does he. Then he gets them to go up to their room and invents a game that allows him to shoot them, one after the next, without giving them the time to suspect a thing—and how could they, until the sudden but infinitely surprising moment when the bullets hit their bodies? He leaves the house and goes to have lunch at his parents’ place, where he gets them to go upstairs one by one and kills them, too. They don’t expect anything either, don’t understand a thing. He even kills the dog, whom he loved and whose photo he always kept in his wallet.
He drives to Paris, where he’s arranged to take Chantal to dinner at the house of a friend of his, Minister of Health Bernard Kouchner, in the elegant suburb of Fontainebleau. The episode is as sinister as it is absurd: Jean-Claude doesn’t know Bernard Kouchner, who doesn’t live in Fontainebleau. They drive for hours through the forest in search of an address that they don’t find, until Chantal loses her temper and he tries to kill her, too. But she doesn’t let him, and no doubt he thinks confusedly to himself that it doesn’t matter, that there’s no harm in her living even if she knows the truth about him, and that there’s no harm in his dying even though he knows she knows. So he lets it drop, says he lost his head for a moment, that he’s sick. He apologizes, drives her home, and takes the highway in the opposite direction. He arrives on Sunday morning, locks himself up in his house with the bodies of his wife and children. He remains there, listless, for almost twenty-four hours. Then, early on Monday morning, he figures the time has come, prepares a cocktail of barbiturates, douses the house with gas, and sets it on fire.
Three and a half years later he’s still alive. The trial will start on June 24 at the criminal court of the department of Ain. The facts are established and acknowledged by all. The verdict won’t fail to be harsh. Eight days have been set aside, not to lessen the sentence but to understand the story of a man who wandered between two realities for so long and now resides in only one, perfectly uninhabitable one.
Published in Le Nouvel Observateur, June 20, 1996
He sees himself sitting beside his wife on the living room couch on Friday night. She’s upset over a phone call with her mother, and he’s trying to console her. Then there’s a blank, a hole in his memory. They may have argued, she may have guessed the truth and asked him to explain. He doesn’t deny it: it could be that, it could be anything, but he can’t remember a thing. The next image is the blood-covered rolling pin in his hands on Saturday morning, and Florence’s lifeless body on the bed. Then his children wake up, and it pains him to remember how he shot them, but he remembers, he even gives details before bursting into tears in the box.
Then he goes to buy the newspapers—the local daily Le Dauphiné libéré and the sports paper L’Équipe, according to the vendor, but he puts in, “Couldn’t have been L’Équipe, I never bought it”—gets the mail from the mailbox, takes the car, and drives to his parents’ place, forty miles away in the Jura department. Once again he sees his father opening the gate, then once again there’s a blank until he kills him, and his mother after him. Then he drives to Paris, meets his former mistress to take her to dinner at the home of the minister of health at the time, Bernard Kouchner—another lie—and no one knows if during this absurd evening spent driving aimlessly through the forest of Fontainebleau he was aware that he had killed his wife, children, and parents just a couple of hours earlier, or if he had deleted this unbearable reality and behaved as if nothing had happened.
On Sunday morning, he’s back at his place, and only at dawn on Monday does he try to poison himself and set the house on fire. Did he eat, did he sleep, did he cry over his family’s bodies during this final, twenty-hour blank? No one will ever know because he himself doesn’t know. The investigation into the case, however, has established that he watched television. He even put a tape into the VCR and recorded 240 minutes of anything and everything: snippets of popular music of the sort all the channels air on Sunday afternoon, broken up by frequent zapping, a second of this, two seconds of that, the whole thing forming a series of disorderly flashes, a dismal, unwatchable kaleidoscope. Since the cassette wasn’t blank, one imagines—and true to his habit he doesn’t deny it—that he recorded all of this to erase its contents: images of the children, birthdays, trips to the mountains, memories of the happy family life that, as he alone knew from the beginning, was entirely based on a lie.
At the courthouse in Bourg-en-Bresse, watching and listening to Jean-Claude Romand, who faked being a doctor for eighteen years and then murdered his family when it became clear his deception would be discovered, you can’t help thinking about the two layers of this cassette. Most of the time the man in the box, gaunt and dressed in black, still looks like what Dr. Jean-Claude Romand looked like—or at least appeared to look like. Like him, he speaks clearly and precisely. He reasons more than he feels; familiar with his file, he explains details, corrects himself, and you’re ready to believe that this composed murderer is in full control of his mental faculties and therefore responsible for his acts.
But at other, not necessarily spectacular, moments, the good cassette breaks in places, and an incoherent chaos of reflexes, suppressed groans, and devastated memories shows through. All of a sudden the man becomes fissured, and it’s as if you were standing on the brink of an abyss. At that moment you sense with certainty that the silence that has grown in him since his childhood was nothing more and nothing less than hell. It doesn’t last long, then the abyss closes back up, Jean-Claude Romand picks up where he left off, but we in the audience have had ample time to wonder, from the height of our clinical ignorance and flying in the face of four psychiatric experts, if he really belonged in a criminal court, and if what you felt on your nape wasn’t the cold wind of psychosis.
In such cases the court looks for whys. Why didn’t he write the exam that he was practically certain he’d pass? Why did he say he had passed? Why did he marry a woman he loved only to lie to her the whole time, and why did he never try to tell her the truth? Why did he swindle those who trusted him? He’s the only one who can answer these questions, but all he says is that he asks them, too. That he never stopped asking them during the years of deception and never stops turning them over in his head today. In vain. No doubt he wants to understand just as much as we do. But perhaps he’s even less able to than we are and really is denied access to a whole part of himself: the one that lied, killed, and seems as strange and monstrous to him as it does to us.
Weary of speculation, one turns to the hows, the advantage being that at least you can talk about them to other people than him. He alone can say why he lied, and he doesn’t know. But how others believed his lies is a question that concerns his entire entourage. His wife, whose blindness is the most troubling, is no longer there to answer. But his friends are. All doctors, pharmacists, or dentists, they lived within five miles of the WHO, where he said he worked, and seem never to have asked themselves any questions. The same goes for the medical school, where he enrolled in second year for twelve consecutive years, and the tax authorities, to whom he continued to declare zero income although he was pushing forty.
One day, however, the man he considered his best friend, also a doctor, did have a doubt. He never thought Jean-Claude was an impostor, but something about his professional life was strange. The friend got the idea of looking him up in the directory of the WHO, which he’d placed on his desk. He went to open it, and this gesture, if he’d gone through with it, could have been the first in an inquiry that could have saved five lives. But all of a sudden he felt bad about harboring such suspicions about his old friend. He put the directory back on the shelf. Now, in court, he says that for the past three years this story has haunted him. Although he keeps turning it over in his mind, he admits that he still doesn’t understand it. But he says that he doesn’t understand other things in life, and that he’s decided to accept them because that’s the way things are. Behind his glass enclosure, Romand listens, expressionless. No one knows what he’s thinking, not even him.
Published in Le Nouvel Observateur, July 4, 1996