The Dominici Affair

by Martin Kitchen

  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 El
f 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 kn
ew 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.