Death at the Roadside: Sir Jack Drummond

 

On 4 August 1952, an English family on a camping holiday in the south of France pulled into a layby on the N96 near the village of Lurs, seventy-five miles from Aix. The Drummond family consisted of the scientist Sir Jack Drummond, his wife Ann and their ten-year-old daughter. It was a hot afternoon, and they had decided to camp for the night beside the River Durance. Not long after that, all three of them were violently murdered.

It was a puzzling crime. Sir Jack was a very different character from Sir Harry Oakes. He was sixty-one and a former professor of biochemistry at London University. It seemed very unlikely that a former co-worker would have tracked him down in order to exact revenge. Drummond had been rather more than an ordinary academic, though. During the Second World War he had done some major work on nutrition, which had earned him a knighthood; he had also been a senior researcher at the Boots pharmaceutical laboratory in Nottingham.

On the face of it, the triple murder looked like a casual, opportunist act of violence with robbery as its probably motive. The French police apprehended the peasant farmer whose smallholding was the nearest property to the scene of the crime, and charged him with the murders. He was Gaston Dominici, a man of seventy-five.

First on the scene after the murder was Gaston’s son, Gustave Dominici. He initially told the police he had heard shots at one o’clock in the morning on 5 August, and thought there were poachers about. He found the body of the daughter, Elizabeth, at half past five. She was lying near the river, battered to death with a rifle butt. Gustave Dominici had waved down a passing cyclist at six o’clock to tell him to fetch the police. Lady Drummond’s body was found close to a Hillman car and Sir Jack’s body lay just across the road. Both of them had been shot from behind, as if they had been attempting to run away from their killer. The stock of the gun was found floating in the River Durance; the barrel was later found on the river bed.

But Gustave Dominici changed his story, which aroused serious suspicion. One of his neighbours, Paul Maillet, reported that Gustave Dominici had told that when he found Elizabeth she was still alive. One of Dominici’s relatives reported that he had seen Lady Drummond and Elizabeth calling at the Dominici farm with a bucket, to ask for water, when Gustave Dominici, his brother Clovis and their father, Gaston, insisted they had had no contact with the Drummonds. The police were confronted with a wall of silence and deception. Some witnesses were reluctant to say anything. Others made contradictory statements. The police tried to set one family member off against another, which caused even more confusion. The police went on pressing the Dominicis for the truth. Eventually Gustave and Clovis told the police what they wanted to hear, that their father had admitted that he had ‘killed the English’, and on 13 November 1953, the seventy-five-year-old Gaston confessed to the murders.

But this was a classic case of a confession given after a protracted period of determined police interrogation. If the police go on questioning for long enough, interrogation subjects will confess to anything – just to bring the interrogation to an end. This is what seems to have happened in l’affaire Dominici. Needless to say, confessions squeezed out of people under these conditions are meaningless. Shortly after confessing, Gaston Dominici changed his story again, saying he had not committed the murders and had confessed to them only to protect his family. Gustave withdrew his earlier statement too.

The various different versions of what had happened drew strong suspicion on the Dominici family, and the police went on questioning them for fifteen months, certain that the Dominicis were behind the murders. The French legal system went through the whole process of putting the old man, Gaston Dominici, on trial, but it was hard to see what his motive might have been. He was a pillar of the local community. There were other questions, too. Men were seen in the area at the time of the murder, men who were never identified. The murders were committed with a battered old American Rock-Ola carbine; where had it come from? One promising line of investigation in recent years has been the probability that Drummond was a spy, caught up in the Cold War.

Nevertheless, Gaston Dominici was brought to trial in Digne a year later. In November 1954 he was found guilty of the three murders without any extenuating circumstances and sentenced to death. He faced the guillotine. But there were so many loose ends in the investigation, the total lack of motive being a major worry, and there were several moves from the central government in Paris to overturn the verdict. One such move came from a young minister, François Mitterand, but initially these had no effect. Then, in 1957, the French President René Coty commuted Dominici’s sentence to one of life imprisonment. Three years later, Coty’s successor Charles de Gaulle set him free. In 1960, de Gaulle watched a television programme about the case. It showed the pathetic eighty-four-year-old man locked up in the prison of Les Baumettes in Marseilles. He affirmed his innocence. It was evident that he was unhappy to be so far away from his farm, and to be separated from his dog. The programme was profoundly influential. As a viewer, de Gaulle was moved by the old man’s predicament and granted him a pardon on 13 July 1960.

One reason for believing that Gaston Dominici was innocent is that in his forced ‘confession’ the reason he gave for killing the whole family was that Sir Jack had caught him offering to have sex with an undressed Lady Drummond, which was completely absurd. Presumably Gaston thought that up, forgetting that he was seventy-five and distinctly past his best, as press photographs of the time clearly show. A second reason is that the US army rifle did not belong to him and he had no idea how to use it.

Some time after the murders, a man called William Bartkowski was arrested in Germany in connection with another crime. He unaccountably and spontaneously admitted to being one of four contract hit men who had been hired to kill Drummond. This confession has never been satisfactorily explained. Bartkowski’s scenario involving four hit men would tie in with the sighting by at least four local passers-by of some unidentified men (not Sir Jack and not the Dominicis) on the road near the crime scene. Post mortems on Sir Jack and Lady Drummond revealed that the bullet entry wounds were of different sizes, so two guns were used; by implication, there were at least two killers.

A closer scrutiny of Sir Jack Drummond’s past life revealed what may have been a highly significant pattern of activity. The camping holiday had not taken Drummond to Lurs entirely by chance. He had been there at least three times before, in 1947, 1948 and 1951, so he had visited the place four times in five years. Close to the village, about six miles away, was a chemical factory that had started manufacturing advanced insecticides for crops. During the Cold War, insecticides were widely believed to have the potential to be used as a chemical weapon. One possibility is that Drummond was acting as a kind of industrial spy, with a view to reporting back to the authorities in Britain on the chemical production activities at Lurs. The camping holiday was therefore a cover for this espionage. In support of this hypothesis is the fact that Drummond’s camera was never found; by implication it was taken by the hit men in order to conceal the nature of Drummond’s recent activity.

Sir Jack had a long discussion in Lurs, just two days before he died, with a man called Father Lorenzi. Father Lorenzi was a priest who was known to have been a prominent figure in the French resistance during the Second World War. We can only speculate about the nature of Drummond’s conversation with Lorenzi, but it is significant that Paul Maillet was another French resistance fighter and a friend of Gustave Dominici. Maillet is believed to have been the true owner of the US army rifle.

The Dominici family evidently knew things about the murders, or the run-up to the murders, which they were unable to reveal – even though it meant that old Gaston might be guillotined as a result. It may be that their web of friendships in the area gave them some knowledge not only of the French resistance during the war, but also knowledge of what secret activities of resistance fighters were continuing in the Cold War, too. The Dominicis may have been persuaded to help some scheme, perhaps to outwit or block Drummond’s espionage work, not knowing that the outcome would be the murder of the whole family. That would certainly be consistent with their confused state of mind in the weeks following the murders.

Gaston Dominici is now long dead, but his family is still fighting to clear his name. William Bartkowski may have been one the four hit men, though there is no corroboration for his confession; the identity of the other three, if indeed there were three more, has never been discovered.