Shortly before six o’clock in the morning of 5 August 1952, Jean-Marie Olivier was returning home to Oraison on his New-Map motorcycle, having finished the night shift at the chemical factory in Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban. He was halfway home on the route nationale N96 when, on the left-hand side of the road, a man popped up “like a jack-in-the-box” from behind a vehicle parked on the side of the road and flagged him down.1 Olivier, who recognized the man by sight, slammed on the breaks and pulled up about 98 feet farther down the road. The man ran after him and, after pausing to catch his breath, asked Olivier to go to the gendarmes in Oraison because he had seen “a dead body on the slope on the edge of the road.” Without pausing to investigate the scene of the crime or to ascertain the precise location, Olivier drove off in the direction of Oraison. Just over 130 yards from where he had stopped, two women—one old, one young—were leaning motionless against a farmhouse wall.
While Olivier drove to Oraison, Faustin Roure left home on his moped at about 6:15 a.m. to examine the damage done by the landslide, as he had promised Gustave Dominici. On the way he overtook three men on bicycles: Gustave’s brother Clovis, Roger Drac, and Marcel Boyer, who was also Clovis’s brother-in-law. They were all were members of Roure’s SNCF team.2 Faustin arrived at the Grand’ Terre at 6:35 a.m. Ignoring the car parked on the side of the road, he went directly to the bridge over the railway and examined the extent of the landslide. Crossing the bridge he turned left, walked parallel to the railway for a couple of hundred yards, then went down the slope to see whether any immediate action was required.
Boyer was the next to arrive on the scene. He pedaled past the parked British car without noticing anything untoward and went to join Gustave, who was standing on the road near the farmhouse. Gustave just had time to tell Marcel that there was a dead body nearby, when his brother Clovis arrived.3 He noticed the general disorder around the parked car, with empty suitcases, cardboard boxes, pillows, and blankets strewn around. He remarked that the campers must have had quite a party. According to Boyer’s testimony, Gustave replied that he had heard five or six shots at about five or six o’clock that morning. Gesturing with his arm in the direction of the Durance, he added that he had discovered “a dead body.” Clovis and Boyer walked in the direction indicated. Boyer stayed at the top of the slope, while Clovis scrambled downward toward the Durance to have a closer look.
When Roure arrived after examining the landslide, Clovis asked him, “Have you seen it?” Roure, imagining that he was referring to the landslide, replied that fortunately he had seen nothing that would hinder the train’s passage. Clovis then nodded his head in the direction of the body of a young girl lying in the tall grass a few meters down the slope. For whatever reason, whether out of indifference or an anxiety not to get involved in any way, neither Roure nor Boyer went to have a closer look. The three men then returned to the farm.
On their way back, they noticed the outline of another body, completely covered by a blanket, near the English car. On the other side of the road, they also saw an overturned camp bed. Again they did not take a closer look. Clovis and Boyer mounted their bicycles and pedaled back to the Grand’ Terre to join Gustave; his young wife, Yvette; and his mother, Marie. Roure went back to the bridge, where he had parked his moped, and pushed it along to join the others.
Roure’s detail was scheduled to begin work at the Lurs railway station at 7:00 a.m., so he ordered his men to move on. They all left, except for Clovis, who was anxious to find out what had happened on the family farm. Having given his men their orders, Roure headed to Peyruis to inform his SNCF superiors that all was well. He also told the telephone company (Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones) that some branches had fallen on the telephone wires and that they needed to be removed.
Roure, who had been active in the communist partisans (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français [FTPF]) during the war and was the secretary of the Peyruis cell of the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français [PCF]), also reported the incident at the Grand’ Terre to Roger Autheville, secretary of the Departmental Federation of the PCF and thus head of the party in the Basses-Alpes. He was also a journalist.4 He had been the commander of the Fifteenth Company of the FTPF in Sigonce, a particularly violent outfit in which Gustave Dominici had served. Gustave’s role in the Resistance was far from glorious. He joined on 15 August 1944, the day the Allies landed in southern France. He seems to have done little, apart from taking part in the victory parade in Forcalquier, where he proudly displayed his armband to a local photographer.
Autheville arrived on the scene of the crime very early in the proceedings, both in search of a good story and to keep an eye on the local party militants. Paul Maillet, the local secretary, was the Dominicis’ friend. Yvette Dominici’s father was a member of the party’s Departmental Federation. Her brother-in-law Clovis was a member of the Peyruis cell as well.
All locally prominent figures in the Communist Party visited the Grand’ Terre. They included Mr. Emmanuelli, the director of the communist newspaper La Marseillaise, and Mr. Bonnaire, alias “Noël,” who was a former colonel in the FTPF. The communist Sunday newspaper, Humanité-Dimanche, sent a special correspondent to investigate. He later wrote, “Lurs has witnessed two scourges: the killer and the police. As a result two families have been afflicted: the Drummonds and the Dominicis.”
The Communist Party had good reason to frustrate the efforts of the police. After the liberation of France, there had been a series of what the minister of justice had called “executions without a judicial guarantee,” or executions in what amounted to something like a civil war between “collaborators” and “resisters.” It has been estimated that roughly the same number of people, 160,000–170,000, were on each side, with the Resistance being minuscule until June 1944.5 Contrary to legend, the Resistance concentrated more on killing other Frenchmen than on disposing of Germans. Regardless of whether the victims were compatriots or occupiers, the communists saw it all as part of a glorious “struggle against Fascism.”
It is hardly surprising that we know very little about the Dominicis between the armistice in 1940 and the end of the war. This was a particularly troubled period in French history, a time of betrayals and shameful compromise, of extraordinary heroism and base opportunism, of the vicious settling of accounts, of cover-up and deceit. There were active resisters, collaborators, the indifferent, and those who waited to see which way the wind would blow. The lines were seldom clearly drawn and were often crossed.
Until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the PCF, true to the spirit of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, offered no resistance to the Germans. Only in November 1942, when Vichy France was occupied, did it become active in the south. The local group based in Sigonce was then commanded by “Capt. Della Serra” (alias Manuel Lopez). The group’s reputation was far from honorable, for it was generally regarded as an unruly bunch of robbers and assassins. This assessment was definitely not the result of intense anticommunist sentiment among conservative peasants. At that time the communists were extremely popular, and the party did everything it could to attract rural support. The FTPF’s activities, however, rendered them so unpopular that the PCF sent Roger Autheville to try and bring them to order. He did his best, but his mission was unsuccessful. After the war Roger was a frequent visitor to the Grand’ Terre. He and his friend Paul Maillet would both be expelled from the PCF, however, when the local leadership felt that their involvement with the Dominicis reflected badly on the party.
Another resistance movement, based on the Ganagobie plateau, was commanded by “Capt. Claude” Renoir, the youngest son of the painter Auguste and brother of the movie director Jean Renoir. Nicknamed “Coco,” he often served as his father’s model, notably in Claude Renoir en clown. He trained as a ceramicist and worked in the film industry as an actor, an assistant director, and a director. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the resistance medal for his wartime activities. His group comprised some twenty-five men; most were former policemen, army officers, or civil servants who refused to serve the Vichy regime. They were in direct contact with London and received parachute drops of arms and money, which were used to build up the resistance movement in southeastern France. At the Ganagobie monastery, Father Lorenzi gave them his enthusiastic support, helping to hide them when unwanted visitors arrived. The Germans never discovered their hideout.
A third group, the Secret Army (Armée secrète), was established in 1943 by the resistance hero Jean Moulin. It was the most highly disciplined and effective of all the resistance movements. In the south it was made up of the amalgamation of two groups, Combat and Libération Sud. On 1 February 1944 the FTPF theoretically joined them to form the Forces françaises de l’intérieur (FFI), and in June Gen. Marie-Pierre Koenig, the hero of the Battle of Bir Hacheim, took command. But cooperation was never close because of serious ideological differences.
That Gaston, who was already in his late sixties during the war, played no active part in the Resistance is hardly surprising. He tended his flock, dabbled in the black market, and kept his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut. He often hinted that he knew what Gustave had been up to while in the FTPF and that he would use it against him were that necessary; but quite what that was we shall never know. The Communist Party actively supported the Dominicis in the early stages of the murder investigation and did what they could to frustrate the efforts of the police, but here again the party’s motives are obscure. Neither Gaston nor his son Gustave were ever party members.
In France after the Allies landed, some 10,000 people were killed in extrajudicial proceedings as “resisters” settled scores with “collaborators.” Within a radius of nine miles of Lurs there were a number of such “executions,” and Gaston and Gustave were certainly aware of them. One such instance was the assassination of the mayor of Peyruis François Muzy. A former gendarme, he had served as mayor for twenty-five years and was elected as departmental councilor. He was also a member of the Radical Party, a staunch republican, and an outspoken anticommunist. His wife was a schoolteacher who worked for a time at the tiny school in Ganagobie. She knew Gaston, as did her husband, who had given him a Gras rifle.6 Muzy was gunned down in his own home on 29 June 1944 by two young men who accused him of denouncing members of the Resistance. As a man who was widely liked and respected, his death came as a terrible shock.
A number of communists had been arrested at the beginning of the war on orders from the Édouard Daladier government. They were released after the armistice thanks to the Germans, who until 22 June 1941 were allied with the Soviet Union. The authorities in the Basses-Alpes asked Muzy to keep a close eye on the activities of two communists who had recently been released from a detention camp. Much to the disappointment of the prefect, the mayor absolved them of any defeatist sentiments.7 In spite of Muzy’s positive report, one of these men, Pierre Puissant, was arrested and eventually interned in Algeria, where he was liberated by the Allied forces in November 1942. He died fighting with the Free French at Monte Casino, Italy. The other, André Jouval, was seldom seen and soon joined the Maquis.
Muzy was certainly no hero but simply an ordinary man caught up in terrible times. On the one hand, he did nothing to help the Jews in Peyruis, even though rumors of their fate were circulating. They emanated from the mistress of the Gestapo boss in Sisteron. On the other hand, he helped save known communists from the Germans. One of these men was to become his successor.
With Muzy out of the way, Peyruis became the only commune in the Basses-Alpes controlled by the PCF. The elections of 1945 witnessed some bizarre maneuvers by the communists. Three candidates ran for the communal elections: a communist, a socialist, and an independent.8 The communist failed to get an absolute majority in the first round of elections, whereupon the socialist withdrew from the race. The communist was duly elected councilor but soon afterward was found dead (presumably poisoned), and his house was burgled. It was widely believed that he possessed a list of fourteen people in Lurs who were to have been killed by the FTPF group of which Gustave was a member.
Della Serra’s FTPF group was involved in a number of heinous crimes disguised as acts of resistance, and the members were determined to cover them up in the postwar years. Ten minutes after Muzy was shot, the local justice of the peace, Mr. Itais, was gunned down in his garden, with an entire magazine emptied into his body. His only apparent offense was that as a royalist and anticommunist, he was clearly in the reactionary camp. He had been involved in judging a murder case concerning a woman who was said to have been of German or Lorrainian origin and rumored to have been the mistress of a German officer. The murderers were never discovered, but it was assumed that they were from the FTPF. The case had been closed by the time of the justice’s death. One link with the Dominicis was that the woman concerned lived about 100 yards from the farm owned by Gustave’s father-in-law.
Also in Peyruis Mr. Amalrie, the local head of the FFI, which was also known as the “Fee-Fee,” was gunned down. At Saint-Auban two brothers of a miller by the name of Queyrel were shot. This turned out to have been a mistake, obliging “Noël” to apologize to the unfortunate miller. Across the Durance at Mées, a young hairdresser, Miss Colette, paid the highest price for having offered comfort to the enemy. A married couple who ran a tobacco shop at Mallefougasse were killed, as were a farmer and his entire family in Pierrerue. An eighty-year-old antiquarian at Valensole, Jean Mille, was shot. At La Motte-du-Caire Dr. Ciamborrani was killed and his gold tooth removed.
The most spectacular of these murders in the neighborhood occurred directly across the Durance River from the Grand’ Terre at the Château de Paillerol, where a married couple, the Cartiers, lived with their grandson and Monsieur Cartier’s mother. They had a daily cleaning woman, who lived in the village, while a local peasant looked after the grounds. During the war they received regular visits from the Maquis, who demanded food and money. These demands were so excessive as to amount to extortion, so Cartier began to protest. One morning the cleaning woman, Miss Gal, arrived for work to find the door locked. The elder Mrs. Cartier was hanging out of a second-floor window, screaming for help. Some neighbors arrived on the scene and managed to break down the door. They found Mr. Cartier lying on the floor, shot through the head. Mrs. Cartier’s body was found on the first-floor landing. She had also been shot in the head. Their bed was unmade, and they had obviously been awoken in the middle of the night. Mr. Cartier’s office had been turned upside down. His safe was open and empty.
The grandmother said that she had heard voices at about ten o’clock the previous evening. There had been a furious dispute and sounds of physical violence. The inquest concluded that since the door had not been forced open, the Cartiers must have known their assailants. The investigation was put into the hands of Commissioner Stigny from Nice. He had hardly begun his inquiries when he was rudely interrupted by FFI members while eating his dinner in his lodgings in Forcalquier. He was asked to follow them. His body was later found in a ditch a short distance from Paillerol.
It later transpired that a colleague in the Nice police department had denounced Stigny as a collaborationist. He had been executed on orders from “Serge,” the departmental head of the FTPF, who in civilian life was a bookseller from Paris named Schulz. After the war Schulz was amnestied. Lamontre, the policeman who had denounced Stigny, was given a ten-year jail sentence but was soon set free. A direct connection between the murders of the Cartiers and Stigny was never established, but whatever the case, they were both the work of Della Serra and his men.
Another inexplicable murder was that of André Gras, a photographer from Forcalquier. He had not been a member of the Maquis, but he had rendered the FTPF service on a number of occasions. In August 1944 four young men entered the tobacconist’s shop run by his parents and asked to see him. He was led away, and nothing was heard of him for two years. His bones were found in the cemetery in Forcalquier. His gold bridgework, wedding ring, and watch had been removed. Neither any apparent motive nor the murderers were ever found. A wall of silence surrounded the crime, as was the case in so many other inexplicable incidents during these troubled times.
Charles Tillon and André Marty, two militant communists who had been expelled from the party hierarchy in 1952 after being denounced as police spies, sought refuge in the region at Montjustin. They had been charged with being police informers and for ideological heterodoxy. Tillon had been a prominent figure in the FTPF and after the D-Day landings had tried to organize a communist revolution in France, but Joseph Stalin ordered the party’s leader, Maurice Thorez, to rein in this headstrong revolutionary. Forced to undergo a process of intense self-criticism, he had retired to the Basses-Alpes, where his faithful henchmen kept the press and photographers at bay with clubs and rocks. Marty had been on the secretariat of the Communist International (Comintern) and had played a controversial role as the inspector general of the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.9 In 1943 he represented the PCF in Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government and soon rose to be number 3 in the party hierarchy after Maurice Thorez—whom he detested—and Jacques Duclos.
Jean Giono, the local writer and member of the Académie Française, said that the war and the Resistance had resulted in an appalling transformation of the region. With staggering exaggeration, he told a British journalist:
During the war and during the liberation the people of the country, who were normally law-abiding and kind, in appearance at least, became beasts: women are known to have torn young boys who could have been their sons into pieces with their bare hands. A young man I know, who seemed quite harmless, after raping a woman, poked out her eyes, cut off her ears and otherwise mutilated her with a kitchen knife. His excuse was that she spoke with a German accent. She was in fact a Frenchwoman from Alsace. Practically all the population did something for which they could easily be blackmailed. That atmosphere still hovers over us. Their hatred of the Germans has now been turned against English speaking foreigners, particularly Americans.10
Giono seems to have forgotten that in 1942 he had told the German consul in Marseille that he had “more faith in the task of bringing France and Germany closer together, for which end I have been working ever since 1933,” and that he had asked the well-known journalist Alfred Fabre-Luce, “What is Hitler—the man—if not a poet in action?”11
Thus, with still a lot of unfinished business, that the locals would be loath to talk or assist in a local murder investigation is not surprising. Most of them still possessed weapons they had obtained during the war, despite the authorities’ efforts to collect them. The Dominicis were also known to be violent. One night in 1946 two truck drivers had stopped outside the Grand’ Terre. Clovis had welcomed them with a burst of machinegun fire. He later told the gendarmes that he had thought they were burglars. Two years later Gustave had a pistol stolen. The robber, Sube by name, was arrested. He testified that he had seen a military weapon in the Grand’ Terre. The gendarmes investigated and found a Mauser rifle. Gustave was fined 6,000 francs and given a suspended sentence.
Back at the Grand’ Terre, the next person to arrive on the morning of 5 August was Jean Ricard. He was a thirty-six-year-old traveling salesman from Marseille who had been camping and visiting Father Lorenzi, a lone monk who lived in the nearby monastery at Ganagobie.12 He came upon the scene of the crime shortly before 7:00 a.m. He had walked down from the hilltop on which the monastery is situated to catch the bus for Marseille. The bus stop was about 100 yards past the Grand’ Terre. Noticing the incredible shambles around the car, which he saw had GB number plates, he assumed that there had been some sort of accident. Since there was no one around, the Dominicis having gone back into the farmhouse, he decided to take a closer look. He saw an overturned camp bed at a distance of between 5 and 7 feet from the car, with a person sleeping on the ground rather than on the camp bed; but anxious not to miss the bus, he did not stop to investigate further. The bus soon arrived and took him home.13
Meanwhile the motorcyclist, Jean-Marie Olivier, had arrived at the gendarmerie at Oraison at about 6:15 a.m. and reported the incident to the duty officer, Fernand Gilbert. Olivier told him that he had been stopped by a peasant, whom he knew by sight, on the main road near Lurs. The man had told him to report to Oraison or to telephone the gendarmes in Forcalquier that he had discovered a dead body. The man had pointed in the direction of the Durance. Olivier claimed that the man, who turned out to be Gustave, had said someone who seemed to be dead was lying on the slope down to the river and that “there must be some other dead bodies.” Olivier also stated that he had seen two women—presumably Yvette and Marie Dominici—on the lookout, standing near the farmhouse.
Gilbert immediately alerted the head of the Oraison station, as well as the gendarmes at Forcalquier under Capt. Henri Albert. The latter ordered two of his men to take a motorcycle with a sidecar and proceed at once to the Grand’ Terre. On their way, however, they were stopped by Aimé Perrin, Germaine (née Dominici) Perrin’s brother-in-law.
Aimé told a somewhat garbled story in his impenetrable dialect. His wife, who was already working in the fields beside the railway line, had been informed by Albert Bourgues, who worked for the SNCF under Roure, that there had been a “killing” at the Grand’ Terre. Perrin had taken his moped to go and have a look and met Yvette on the way. She said there had been shots during the night and that Gustave had found a young girl’s body on the slope leading down to the Durance and had asked for help in alerting the gendarmes. Since they had not yet arrived, she explained that she was on her way to a store at Giropey so she could telephone the gendarmerie and find out what was happening. When Aimé said he wanted to see for himself what was going on at the Grand’ Terre, she begged him not to go, suggesting that he might go in her stead to call the gendarmes.
The gendarmes told him that they were already on their way to the scene of the crime. Thus, Aimé returned home and told his wife what had happened. He then went to the Grand’ Terre.
No one seemed to think it was strange that Yvette, who was pregnant, was sent on a bicycle to fetch the gendarmes rather than Gustave, who had a motorcycle. Nor was she ever asked why she had been so insistent that Aimé should not go to the Grand’ Terre right away. Was it because the Dominicis needed time to make some changes at the scene of the crime?
The two gendarmes, Sgt. Louis Romanet and Gendarme Raymond Bouchier, arrived at the Grand’ Terre at 7:15 a.m. They were surprised to find the place deserted. Roger Perrin and his wife, Germaine, were the next to arrive. The gendarmes went up to the Hillman Minx station wagon. Just at the moment that they saw a body covered with a blanket, Gustave came up behind them. He then showed them another body, that of a man lying on the other side of the road, covered by an overturned camp bed. Romanet immediately went to Giropey to telephone his superior officer, Captain Albert, as well as the mayor of Lurs Henri Estoublon. Bouchier remained at the Grand’ Terre, where he took some photographs.14
No one attempted to cordon off the area because in those days the gendarmes were not provided with the yellow or orange tape now used for this purpose. The French police paid scant attention to material evidence. They concentrated almost exclusively on questioning witnesses in the hope of finding the motives behind the crime. It was an approach that later horrified the British police and did not prove very helpful in uncovering a seemingly motiveless crime.
Captain Albert, having been informed of the extent of the crime, called his immediate superior, Commandant Bernier, in Digne as well as the judicial police in Nice, which were responsible for the Department of Basses-Alpes. The court in Digne was also alerted.
At about 7:45 a.m. Gaston Dominici came back to the farmhouse with his herd of goats. At roughly the same time Roure returned to the Grand’ Terre on his moped, followed shortly afterward by Roger and Germaine Perrin’s son, Zézé, who came from his home at La Serre on a bicycle. Yvette told Gaston that bodies had been found nearby. He asked her where. She pointed the direction out to him. Accompanied by Gustave and joined by Zézé, he set off toward the Hillman.15 No one seemed to find it strange that this was ostensibly the first Gaston had heard of the murders. His son had found a dead body on his property, yet neither Gustave nor Yvette had apparently seen fit to tell him what had happened until hours later.
Captain Albert arrived at the scene of the crime in his black Peugeot 203 shortly afterward. He was accompanied by two other gendarmes, Crespy and Rebaudo. They found Gaston, Gustave, and Zézé standing near the Hillman. Although Captain Albert was an experienced officer with an excellent reputation, he also did nothing to seal off the crime scene, which was rapidly becoming seriously compromised with the arrival of neighbors and curious passersby, who parked their cars along the main road. They were soon joined by sundry other officials and several journalists. Commandant Bernier, who arrived shortly afterward from Digne, also did nothing to rectify this lamentable state of affairs.
The attitude of Gustave and Yvette seemed incomprehensible to Captain Albert. He asked Yvette why she had not even bothered to have a look at the little girl. Her reply was curt: “I’m not a nurse! Anyway, I didn’t want to get mixed up in this business.” Albert then asked Gustave why he had not gone to check on Elizabeth’s parents. He replied: “One can’t think of everything.” Albert was also intrigued by the precision with which all the Dominicis remembered both the arrival of a motorcycle with a sidecar at 11:30 the previous night and the sound of foreigners who chatted away and a woman laughing. This was in marked contrast to their hazy recollection of the events surrounding the murders. They admitted to having heard shots but claimed that they came from the other side of the river, from Peyruis, or even from the mountains. They claimed not to have heard any screams or any other suspicious noises. With the Hillman only about 170 yards from the farmhouse, this story was scarcely credible, especially on a hot night in August when they slept with the windows open.
At 9:30 a.m. Deputy Public Prosecutor Louis Sabatier, Examining Magistrate Roger Périès, and Clerk of the Court Émile Barras—all of whom were officials of the court in Digne—arrived in their official Peugeot. Hardly conducive to a cool-headed investigation of the crime scene, all this hullabaloo was the result of the intertwining of police, judicial, and local authorities entrenched in the French legal system, in which the definitions of fields of competence are liable to become blurred.
Under French law when a murder takes place, the public prosecutor (procureur de la république) opens the investigation. In the case of murder he or she is obliged to hand the conduct of an inquiry to a prosecuting magistrate (juge d’instruction). The prosecutor is attached to a higher court (Tribunal de grande instance), is appointed by the president of the republic, and is responsible to the minister of justice, whereas the prosecuting magistrate is fully independent and free from political control.
The prosecuting magistrate enjoys complete independence to initiate a judicial inquiry. He or she is responsible for coordinating the judicial inquiry within the limits set by the prosecutor. With authority over the police investigation, the medical-legal team, and other experts, the magistrate decides whether and when to give the judicial police the right to examine witnesses and to issue search warrants (rogatory permission.) He or she is obliged to take note of the defense lawyers and those acting on behalf of a civil suit. Additional responsibilities include overseeing the autopsy and keeping track of all the interviews conducted by the judicial police and the magistrates (procès-verbaux).
Next the examining magistrate decides whether the assembled dossier merits an indictment or whether the case should be dismissed (non-lieu). Upon indictment he or she is obliged to make the entire dossier available to the defense, but it is not given to the jury. The dossier is then sent to the local court of appeal (cour de cassation) for a pretrial hearing. If the judge supports the prosecuting magistrate’s case, it is then sent to trial in an assize court (cour d’assise), the only court in France with trial by jury.
The powers of the prosecuting magistrates, an office instigated by Napoleon in 1811, are considerable and are the matter of intense debate. On the one hand, their independence from political control, plus the fact that they can start an investigation on their own initiative without first being ordered to do so by the public prosecutor, has enabled them to probe into the activities of such powerful politicians as Jacques Chirac, Roland Dumas, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Dominique de Villepin, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Christine Lagarde; businessmen such as Bernard Tapie; and banks like the Crédit Lyonnais. Eva Joly, a fiercely independent prosecuting magistrate, launched a spectacular investigation into a $325 million corruption scandal involving the oil concern Elf Aquitaine between 1995 and 2002, and thirty of the thirty-seven prominent accused were found guilty.
On the other hand, there have also been startling abuses, such as Fabrice Burgaud’s investigation of pedophiles in 2002 that resulted in fourteen innocent Frenchmen being held on remand for up to three years. Relatively few cases are now investigated by the prosecuting magistrates, most of them dealing with terrorism, where the examining magistrates have proven relatively successful in their dual roles as detectives and judges. They are responsible for collecting inculpatory and exculpatory evidence. The danger that they are answerable to no one is offset by fears that if they were to be abolished, then the judiciary would be subjected to an unacceptable degree of political control.
An inquiry into penal procedure in France, conducted by Philippe Léger in 2009, recommended abolishing the office of examining magistrate. The commission’s principle arguments were that the prosecuting magistrate was placed in an essentially ambiguous situation by being required to be both inquisitor and judge. Ninety-five percent of criminal cases were conducted by the Judicial Police, acting on behalf of the public prosecutor, without the intermediary of an examining magistrate. The system is time consuming and expensive, and it leads to a lengthy delay before bringing a case to trial. Further complications arise because a plea of guilty is inadmissible in a French court. A case as complex as that of Bernard Madoff, had it occurred in France, would have taken years rather than months to reach a final judgment.
The Léger commission’s recommendations provoked a fierce debate, with the Left insisting that such changes would bring the judicial system under stricter governmental control and make prosecutions in cases of political corruption, public health abuses, and so on, less likely. Supporters of the reform proposal pointed out that a similar office in Germany (Untersuchungsrichter) was abolished in 1977, thereby greatly streamlining the judicial system without any noticeable ill effects. Opposition to the Léger proposals was so fierce that the system remained unchanged, and examining magistrates continued to uncover a number of spectacular cases of corruption.
Dr. Henri Dragon, a country doctor with no experience in forensic medicine, came to the Grand’ Terre with the mayor of Lurs at about 8:30 a.m. Long before the criminal investigation team arrived from Marseille, he made a superficial examination of the bodies, and in the process, he moved them.16 First, he crossed the road and removed the camp bed that was covering a male body, dressed in a white sweater, blue pajama bottoms, socks, and unlaced tennis shoes. He noticed two bullet wounds in the neck, but he did not say whether the entry wound was in the front or back. He then examined the female body, which was wearing a red dress with a floral print, vest, bra, and panties, lying partially covered on the ground behind the Hillman. The feet were bare. He turned the body over, cut the left strap of her bra and the right sleeve of her dress, but made no precise description of her wounds.
Last he went across the railway bridge to examine the body lying on the slope down to the Durance. It was that of a young girl wearing sky-blue pajamas and with bare feet. Her skull had been crushed by blows from a blunt instrument. Whereas the other two victims showed advanced signs of rigor mortis, the girl’s body was still noticeably relatively supple. According to the doctor, the soles of the girl’s feet showed no signs of abrasions even though the ground between the car and where she was lying was covered with pebbles, coarse grass, and prickly plants. This seemed to indicate that the body had been carried from the campsite and deposited out of sight in the long grass on the reverse slope. Dr. Dragon felt that the nature of the head wound indicated that the girl had been hit while lying down. These points in Dr. Dragon’s report would later cause a fierce debate. The police report clearly indicates that there were traces of shingle on her feet. (Commissioner Edmond Sébeille stresses this detail in his account of the crime, admittedly written in self-defense eighteen years later.)
Having thus had a brief look at the three bodies, Dr. Dragon went to the Grand’ Terre and asked Gaston Dominici, whom he knew well, for water with which to wash his hands. The old peasant appeared to be in a state of shock. All he could do was to repeat the words “some water, some water!” Instead of inviting him into the house, Marie filled a basin with water, but Gaston brushed it aside, complaining that the horses would smell the blood and would refuse to drink out of it. The doctor washed his hands under the outdoor pump. The Dominicis seemed determined to avoid letting the doctor enter the house. What could they have had to hide?
At about ten o’clock a police dog from Digne, a regional champion, arrived at the Grand’ Terre with its handler, Legonge. The German shepherd bitch snuffled around in various directions but found no new clues. She did not show any particular interest in any of the Dominicis, nor did she follow the track leading from the little girl’s body to the campsite. This too suggested that the girl might have been carried and had not run away in a desperate attempt to escape her murderer.
The murders were soon reported in the French and international press. The summer months were a bit short of news. A number of UFOs had been spotted in the United States. Before the television age, the Helsinki Olympics had not excited great interest. The epoch-making formation of the European Coal and Steel Community aroused little popular enthusiasm, and Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s overthrow of King Farouk seemed of little concern, although details of the king’s sybaritic private life was not without entertainment value. There was a lull in the fighting in Indochina. But although the murders provided excellent copy for a press hungry for lurid news, undoubtedly they caused real shock and dismay, particularly in France. As Paris Match wrote: “The horrible assassination of Sir Jack Drummond, his wife and daughter, is a matter for individual mourning for all the French. They were our guests, invited to share our joie de vivre and our sun.”17
Meanwhile, the police in Forcalquier had duly informed the police in Nice of the murder, but being seriously overworked during the summer season, the Nice police told Captain Albert to refer the case to the regional service of the judicial police in Marseille. For this reason it was not until nine o’clock that news of the triple murder reached Commissioner Georges Harzic’s office at the Marseille police headquarters, the Échêvé. Formerly the bishop’s palace, it also housed the offices of the Ninth Mobile Brigade of the judicial police.18 Harzic decided to give the case to Commissioner Edmond Sébeille. Albert warned Harzic that it was going to be a very difficult crime to solve. Harzic condescendingly replied that had this not been the case, there would have been no need for the gendarmes to consult the judicial police. Thus, from the outset the case was bedeviled by the rivalry between the gendarmes and the Judicial Police.
Commissioner Sébeille was just wrapping up a simple case involving an Arab who had been killed in nearby Berre and was looking forward to joining his wife and eighteen-year-old daughter, who were at their holiday home in the Aveyron. His holidays were to begin on 14 August. At 9:15 a.m. on 5 August, however, the telephone rang in his office at the Échêvé. Commissioner Harzic asked him to come immediately to his office. He read him the following message from the gendarmerie in Forcalquier:
Three corpses have been found today, 5 August 1952, at about six o’clock in the morning, on the territory of the commune of Lurs, at about 600 metres [650 yards] from the railway station of that locality. Preliminary investigation having been made it would seem that the motive for the crime was theft.
The victims (a man and two women) were killed by a firearm. No identity papers have been found on them. An English car was in the vicinity. Initial information has revealed that shots were heard during the night of the fourth to fifth of August at about one o’clock in the morning.
The gendarmerie from Forcalquier is already at the scene of the crime. The Digne bench has been informed.19
Harzic then asked Sébeille whether he was interested in the case. Sébeille, startled by this remark, replied that if he were not interested he would deserve to be dismissed from the force. He knew the region well, although he had never been all the way up the hill to the village. Harzic said that the case was tailor-made for him, because Sébeille was known as an expert in peasant affairs. Of the fourteen murder cases Sébeille had handled during his career, eight or nine had been in rural areas. He understood Provençal and could speak it reasonably fluently. He prided himself for being able to comprehend the peasant mind and claimed to get on well with country folk.
Appearing to feel little urgency, Sébeille took some time before he decided to set out to Lurs in an ancient Citroën traction avant (front-wheel drive), the classic French police car known colloquially as “the open tomb.” First, he had to close the file on the Berre murder case, and then he had to get his team together. His assistant Henri Ranchin and driver César Girolami were at hand, but he was unable to contact the two other inspectors allotted to the case—Lucien Tardieu and Antoine Cullioli. Both men were engaged in investigations in Marseille and could not be contacted until they returned to headquarters. Next, they had to go home and collect some personal effects. Then they had to wait for twenty minutes behind a long line of military vehicles before the Citroën could be refueled. Being good Frenchmen, they almost certainly stopped for lunch. Although what time they eventually arrived at the Grand’ Terre is not certain, it was unlikely to have been before three o’clock that afternoon.
Sébeille’s team was given a cold reception by Public Prosecutor Sabatier, Examining Magistrate Périès, and Clerk of the Court Barras in Digne. They had been waiting impatiently for five and a half hours for the team and were not impressed by the commissioner’s explanation for his late arrival. Another group of officials—including the sub-prefect and the mayor of Forcalquier, the mayors of Lurs and Peyruis, and the commanding officer of the gendarmerie in the Basses-Alpes—gave them an equally chilly welcome. The main reason for the officials’ disquiet at the police’s late arrival was that under ministerial circular number 32, the gendarmes were forbidden to touch anything on the murder site before the arrival of the police. Thus, a valuable eight hours were lost. Things were not improved by Sébeille’s failure to greet Captain Albert on his arrival, itself testament to the intense rivalry between the gendarmerie and the police. Sébeille was outspokenly contemptuous of the work done so far by those whom he considered to be bungling amateurs.
A large crowd of onlookers was trampling all over the scene of the crime, and the atmosphere reminded Sébeille of a country fair as all manner of people arrived during the day. They wandered around, sought shade from the blistering summer heat, excitedly discussed the mystery of the murder, and had eagerly awaited the arrival of the criminal investigation team. Efforts by Captain Albert and his gendarmes from Forcalquier to control the crowd had proved singularly ineffectual.
Precisely what Sébeille did and at what time is somewhat unclear, prompting all manner of wild speculation. The records of the police, the gendarmes, and the examining magistrate do not give the exact time of his arrival at the crime scene. There is no compelling reason to doubt that Sébeille arrived in time to examine the bodies and have them photographed before they were taken to Forcalquier for a postmortem examination. He claims that he did, and the examining magistrate did not contradict his testimony. Had he arrived after the bodies had been removed it would have constituted a more serious infraction of due procedure that would have brought the entire case into question. Sébeille also claims to have gone to Forcalquier at five o’clock to assist at the autopsies, but there is no corroborating evidence that he was there.
One thing is certain: the scene of the crime had been seriously compromised before Sébeille’s arrival. Contrary to due procedure, the gendarmes had rummaged around in the Hillman in an attempt to discover the victims’ identity. In addition, Dr. Dragon had clumsily moved the bodies and had cut some of the victims’ clothing.
Captain Albert showed Sébeille two cartridges that had been found—one, a few yards in front of the Hillman; the other, 2 yards behind it. He had also found two rounds that had not been fired. From this evidence Sébeille concluded that the weapon used was a semiautomatic gun and that whoever had fired the weapon was unfamiliar with its use.
Further confusion arises over who discovered a bullet mark on the right-hand side of the bridge and when this happened. Commissioner Sébeille claimed that he was the first to have noticed it and did so soon after his arrival on the scene of the crime. Pierre Carrias, Périès’s successor as examining magistrate, insisted that it was not spotted until 16 November 1953, when Gaston Dominici pointed it out in the course of reconstructing the crime and claimed to have shot at little Elizabeth, who was “running away like a rabbit.” There is no mention, however, of this astonishing and improbable confession in the police records. An employee of the ministry of transport also claimed that he was the first to discover it, but Captain Albert testified that he had noticed it during the evening of 7 August.20
Similar confusion exists concerning a second piece of important evidence—namely, a splinter of wood found on the ground near Elizabeth’s head. On 6 August Gaston Dominici claimed in a statement to Commissioner Sébeille that he had found it about a foot from the girl’s head at eight o’clock the previous morning, when he was covering up her body. He said he gave the piece of wood to one of two gendarmes, but he could not remember which one. Neither of them had any recollection of this ever happening. Months later two laborers claimed that one of their colleagues had found the piece of wood about four inches from Elizabeth’s head and that it had been passed from hand to hand. The two men denied that Gaston had handed it over to the gendarmes. Much later Gaston’s son Marcel claimed that he had found it, but he could not remember to whom he had given it.
This piece of wood came from the stock of the murder weapon, which had not yet been found. That Gaston showed such interest in this splinter clearly indicated that he knew that it had come from the weapon and that he knew that Elizabeth had been hit over the head with it. His motives for claiming to have been directly involved in bringing this important piece of evidence forward are obscure. Sébeille argued that it was to explain away any fingerprints that might have been on it, but this makes little sense. If Gaston’s first version was true and assuming that he was indeed the murderer, then he would have disposed of this incriminating piece of evidence. Perhaps he invented the story to show that he was willing to cooperate fully with the investigation, but quite why he should cook up this story, which was flatly contradicted by the laborers’ plausible testimony, is difficult to comprehend.
Even more perplexing than the question of the bullet mark and the piece of wood was a critical piece of evidence that was completely ignored. According to testimony given by Inspector Girolami, Sébeille’s assistant, three years after the murders, at about 3:00 p.m. on 5 August he had seen a pair of well-worn corduroy trousers hanging on a clothesline outside the entrance to Gaston and Marie’s part of the Grand Terre. The trousers were still wet, and no other garments were beside them. Girolami asked Gustave Dominici to whom they belonged. He replied that they were probably his father’s, since they were certainly not his. The inspector then asked him who did the washing in the Grand Terre. Gustave replied that two of his sisters, either Clotilde Araman or Augusta Caillat, took the dirty washing home and brought it back dried and ironed. Girolami reported this to his superior, who promptly told him to get on with more important business.
Sébeille, who did not see anything exceptional about a pair of trousers hanging out to dry near a farmhouse, chose to ignore them, and it was not until the investigation was reopened in 1955 that they took on a central importance. The Dominici daughters confirmed that they did all the washing for the Grand Terre and stated that neither of them had done any washing around the fifth of August 1952. They also stated that their sister-in-law Yvette had read about these trousers in the newspaper account and had confirmed that they had been hanging out to dry that day. But she had added that they had been washed several days before and not because of any bloodstains. Given that the weather was particularly dry and hot in August, there could be no question of them being still soaking wet after several days; nor was there any reason why they should have been left out to dry for days on end.
In 1954 the sub-prefect of Forcalquier, Pierre Degrave, wrote to Captain Albert, the head of the gendarmes in the town, saying that on 5 August 1952 he had heard that another witness had seen a pair of blue work trousers while looking through the window blinds into Gustave’s bedroom. Albert confirmed that on 3 September 1952 he had asked Gustave’s wife about these trousers. She had replied that she had indeed washed a pair of her husband’s trousers that day so that he could have a clean pair for the market in Oraison and had added somewhat truculently that she had a perfect right to do so if she wished.
It is indeed quite extraordinary that Sébeille should have totally ignored the deeply suspicious facts: two pairs of trousers, belonging to Gaston and Gustave Dominici, respectively, were hanging out to dry the same day three horrendous murders had been committed almost on their doorstep and that this was not the normal method of doing the washing at the Grand’ Terre. The Dominicis later denied that this was true, but the testimonies of Inspector Girolami, Sub-prefect Degrave, and Captain Albert—and confirmed by Aimé, another Dominici son—removed any shadow of doubt that this was indeed the case. There are only two credible explanations why they had been either washed or hanging out to dry: First, it could have been that there were bloodstains resulting from the blow to Elizabeth’s head or from moving her parents’ bodies. Second, they could also have gotten wet while disposing the murder weapon in the shallow waters of the Durance.
Sébeille’s astonishing reason for failing to take any notice of such pieces of evidence is that he believed that material evidence in such a case was of minor importance when compared with questions of motive. The case was eventually closed by Gaston Dominici’s confession. In such circumstances, Sébeille argued, the question of whether the trousers were covered with blood or not was of secondary importance. By twisted logic the inspector excused his negligence by saying that if traces of blood had indeed been found on the trousers, they would have simply made Gaston the prime suspect. But since he was that already, the discovery would have made no difference.21