The Dominici Affair

by Martin Kitchen

  Thus, Robert Sébeille’s suspicions concentrated on Gaston, the violent-tempered patriarch, who had shown a complete lack of interest in the crowd of gendarmes, officials, and onlookers who were already at the campsite when he returned with his goats to the Grand’ Terre on the morning of 5 August. He had always tried to intervene whenever the commissioner had discussed the affair with Gustave. He had the cheek to treat a police officer with defiant disdain, and his protestations of the total innocence of his entire clan merely strengthened the suspicion that he had a great deal to hide. Sébeille considered Gaston to be the prime suspect. His son Edmond dutifully agreed.

  Robert also strongly suspected Zézé Perrin, the “smiling liar,” as Edmond had called him. Robert argued that Zézé appeared to be totally relaxed, ready to answer any questions, always with a smile. He appeared to be immature, irresponsible, stupid, and incapable of understanding the consequences of his actions—a moral cretin. Robert felt that he might very well have been involved in the murders. Edmond did not agree with his father on this point, and they argued the pros and cons of Zézé’s involvement in the crime at great length, without reaching a conclusion.

  Sébeille senior ruled out Clovis Dominici as a suspect. He did not live at the Grand’ Terre and was at home that night. His reaction at the sight of the murder weapon was further evidence in his favor. Whereas Gaston and Gustave had shown total indifference when shown the carbine, Clovis had been genuinely shocked—an indication that he knew that something terrible had happened that directly involved his family.

  The question of a motive remained. Robert Sébeille felt it was a senseless crime, of a type not unknown in peasant circles. He did not attach much importance to the fact that the campsite had been ransacked, attributing it to a deliberate attempt to mislead the police investigation into looking for some ingenious motive.

  Upon his release on 16 December, Gustave announced to the press that he had no idea why he had been treated so harshly and added that he felt it grossly unfair that he should be made to pay for others’ crimes. No one bothered to inquire who these others might be. On his return to the Grand’ Terre, the clan gathered to celebrate his return to the fold in great style. Yvette, who had left the Grand’ Terre to stay with her parents, came home to welcome him. Clovis was still staying at the Grand’ Terre. His sister Augusta Caillat, who was part of the welcoming party, went on the offensive. She told the press that her brother was fada (nuts) and an idiot who was quite incapable of defending himself. She claimed that if the police had “knocked on the right door” instead of harassing the Dominici clan, then they would have solved the crime long ago. No one pursued the question of where this mysterious portal might be found. In his frustration Gaston Dominici reportedly said to his grandson Zézé: “What arseholes [couillons] those English were! Why didn’t they get themselves killed somewhere else?”21

  The Dominicis, who had hitherto maintained a solid front behind a wall of silence, began to show signs of discord. The stonehearted clan was beginning to fall apart. Money was the cause. At a gathering of the clan, Gustave’s father-in-law, François Barth, proposed that the family should share the cost of the trial in equal parts. There was full agreement among those present, but when Germaine Perrin, one of the daughters, heard what had been decided, she flatly refused to pay her share. The rest of the family resented this attitude, but later, when Germaine’s son Zézé became implicated in the case, the family rift became acute.

  More serious was the rupture between the Maillets and the Dominicis. The two families had been linked for more than fifty years as they moved from Brunet to Ganagobie and then to Lurs. Paul Maillet and Clovis Dominici worked together and were comrades in the Communist Party. Paul was equally friendly with Gustave. Paul had a strong dislike for Gaston, who had always been patronizing toward his father and boasting of his success as owner of the Grand’ Terre, while the older Maillet was a poverty-stricken sharecropper, now living in penniless retirement. Paul had been genuinely horrified when he learned of Gustave’s failure to seek help for Elizabeth, to the point that he denounced his friend and saw him sent to jail. He had told the court that “dishonor hovers over honor,” but for the moment he still withheld another damaging piece of evidence, which would dramatically change the direction of the investigation.

  Paul Maillet had become something of an embarrassment to the Communist Party. The police had a hold on him because of his possession of illegal weapons and for stealing electricity from the grid. He had denounced Gustave, even though the local party was trying to defend the Dominicis and win support among the French peasantry. He was overly talkative and sought attention. Gustave had served in the FTPF under Roger Autheville, who was now the party’s departmental secretary in the Basses-Alpes. Autheville was anxious to protect his former comrade, but he was concerned that the press might use the discovery of Maillet’s cache of arms to suggest that the party was planning an armed uprising. It was therefore decided to dismiss him from his post as party secretary in Lurs. Maillet was suspended at the end of September and dismissed two months later. Clovis Dominici took his place as the party’s candidate in the local election and was duly appointed to the municipal council. Autheville, in turn, would soon receive the party’s opprobrium. He was dismissed as the party’s departmental secretary in 1953 and thrown out of the party the following year. He was charged with being too compliant with the police, with lacking vigilance, and with having sold photographs and information to two popular magazines.22

  Dismissal was a bitter blow for Paul Maillet. He had been banished from the tightly knit circle of the Communist Party and even experienced an attempt on his life. Returning to his farm one evening, he was knocked off his motorcycle by a wire that had been stretched across his path. Fortunately he was going slowly enough that he did not suffer serious injury, but it was a painful reminder of his ostracism. The Dominicis mounted a concerted campaign against him and spread the rumor that he was the owner of the murder weapon. Gaston’s daughter Augusta Caillat nicknamed Paul Maillet “Sébeille.” People in the village gave him the finger. He was ostracized at work. His children were tormented and his wife fell ill. One day Gaston Dominici came up to him and without saying a word pointed his cane at him like a rifle and made a gesture as if he were pulling the trigger. Maillet also received a number of anonymous threatening letters warning him to keep his mouth shut.

  The campaign against Paul Maillet further convinced Sébeille and Constant that the answer lay somewhere in the Grand’ Terre. Their suspicions were strengthened by some fresh evidence. First, while Gustave was locked up in Digne, a woman from Marseille told Constant that she had seen an extremely sinister-looking man at the far end of a shed at the Grand’ Terre. Then Yvette’s fifteen-year old brother, Jacky Barth, had heard her say something about giving someone some money; otherwise, they would get into serious difficulties. It was also reported that Yvette had said someone called Jo had spent the night at the farm, and cash had changed hands.

  Further information reached Constant that someone had seen Clovis Dominici and Jacky Barth talking to someone called Jo, who was somewhat strangely dressed in overalls and a raincoat, near the Grand’ Terre’s shed at about five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in early September. Marie Dominici was said to have been very perturbed about this man and had insisted that he be given money, or he would cause the family a great deal of grief. The description of this mysterious Jo, although very vague, roughly matched that of Marcel Chaillan, an agricultural laborer in Brillane who worked on a farm close to that of Yvette’s parents, the Barths. He was known to have occasionally slept overnight in the shed.

  Émile Pollak had visited the Grand’ Terre on 8 September at Gustave’s behest to discuss the possibility of taking legal action against certain newspapers. He had arrived with Pierre Charrier, a lawyer from Marseille and a Communist Party activist, who was interested to see the scene of such a notorious crime. Also in the party were Pollak’s mistress Nelly Leroy an
d their six-year-old daughter. While the two men examined the murder site, the little girl saw Gaston with his goats, herding them into the shed. She asked her mother whether she could go and have a closer look. Her mother took her daughter in her arms, because her leg was in a cast, and walked toward the shed. They were stopped by an agitated Jacky Barth, who said they should go not go into the shed because the goats were covered with fleas. There was some talk on this occasion of another man present who had terrible teeth and a face distorted in a rictus.

  In what Constant labeled “Opération Bergerie” along with Sébeille and Examining Magistrate Roger Périès, a series of interviews were conducted to discover what had really happened. Gaston confirmed that he had seen Pollak, the little girl, and her mother, as well as another lawyer. Mother and child had peeped into the shed, but no one else was there. Gaston said that he neither knew a man named Jo nor anyone with frightening dentition. Marie Dominici said that Yvette had been there as well as her young brother Jacky Barth. According to her version of the story, Pollak had shown the goats to his daughter, not her mother. She could not remember having seen Charrier and professed not to know anyone by the name of Jo. Yvette’s father, François Barth, had also been at the Grand’ Terre that day. He confirmed the story that the mother had shown the goats to the little girl, but he claimed not to have seen the two men they had encountered. He too knew of no Jo and could not think of anyone with alarming teeth. Yvette stated that no outsider had been hired to work on the farm, even when Gustave was in jail. Gustave was equally unforthcoming. The only additional information he offered was that Francis Perrin, the local postman and his sister Germaine’s brother-in-law, had also been there.

  Francis Perrin had a much clearer recollection of that Monday. He claimed that a journalist had also been present. This was confirmed by Charrier, who said it was Lucien Grimaud, a reporter from La Marseillaise. Charrier also said that Francis’s father had passed by and that someone had come to borrow a spray. No one asked Francis any questions about either Jo or the teeth. Francis’s father, Louis Perrin, said that he had stopped off on his way home at the Grand’ Terre, where he had seen Nelly Leroy and her daughter by the shed talking to Jacky. Predictably, he knew of no one called Jo, but when asked about the teeth, he pulled back his lips to reveal a startling array of metal teeth and a decayed stump.

  On 12 November, the day of Gustave’s trial, it was the turn of Nelly Leroy. Apart from the Dominicis, she could only remember having seen Jacky, but on further questioning she admitted that she might have seen a man with metal teeth near the shed. She had not heard Marie Dominici say anything about paying off Jo to get him out of the way.

  A few days later Périès questioned Yvette again. This time she remembered that Louis Perrin had been present and expressed surprise that the police were “looking for him.” Périès interviewed Gustave in jail but got nothing more out of him. Gustave professed that he did not know that Francis Perrin and Pierre Charrier had been at the Grand’ Terre that day.

  Marcel Chaillan—a man with a grim appearance and a bizarre set of teeth and, as noted earlier, who was known to have occasionally slept in the shed at the Grand’ Terre—was also submitted to intense questioning. He lived in a house belonging to his brother Louis and shared it with his nephew Fernand, a disabled veteran. Louis lived in a hotel in La Brillane, which he owned. The police thoroughly searched both places. Fernand testified that on the night of 4–5 August his uncle Marcel had dined as usual at his father’s hotel and slept that night in the house. He testified that it would have been impossible for Marcel to have left the house without being heard. Sébeille was inclined to believe Marcel’s brother and nephew. Constant, however, felt that Marcel Chaillan was singularly taciturn, even by the standards of the locals, and that he might well have something more to say. Poor Marcel was known in the neighborhood as dim witted, and the press heavily criticized Sébeille for persisting in questioning this hapless man until he eventually realized that he was on the wrong track.

  Some also chuckled when Sébeille announced that the murderer was a local man, about 5 foot 9. He asked Gustave’s father-in-law, François Barth, to provide him with a list of possible suspects. With 1,200 males in the Lurs community, it was estimated that about 350 men would fit the description, but Gustave Dominici, Paul Maillet, and Marcel Chaillan would have to be omitted from the list. Certain newspapers denounced Sébeille’s team from another angle, accusing them of leading a witch hunt against men “whose sole crime was to have risked their lives in the struggle against the occupying power.”23

  The mysterious Jo was never identified. Possibly he never existed. Why was it that the mention of his name caused such a kerfuffle among the Dominicis? Who was the woman from Marseille who first told the police about him? Was he perhaps an imaginary figure planted by Pollak to lead the gendarmes on a wild goose chase? Was he involved in some illicit operation, such as distilling without a license—still a common practice in the region? Was Jo the code name of one of Gustave’s comrades in the Resistance? Was he the person some witnesses saw near the scene of the crime during the night of 4–5 August? What hold could he have had over the Dominicis? Many such questions were asked. None found an answer. “Jo” disappeared from the dossier.

  Commissioner Sébeille did not officially return to his duties until the end of January 1953. He was vexed by the vicious attacks by the communist press and annoyed that Constant had managed to wring a confession out of Paul Maillet that had sent Gustave, once his principal suspect, to jail. All the more determined to solve the crime, Sébeille decided that a drastic change in tactics was necessary. Bullying and intimidation had only caused a virtually impenetrable wall of silence in a remarkable display of peasant solidarity. Taking a leaf out of Constant’s book, he realized that more could be gained by listening, cajoling, and slowly accumulating minute pieces of evidence until the moment came to strike. Above all, the press, with whom he had been far too open, had to be kept in the dark. Stealth must take the place of bravado. The nagging problem was that this case appeared to him to be a motiveless crime of exceptional barbarity, the outcome of some unfathomable peasant drama.

  Sébeille went first to the Grand’ Terre. Gaston acted somewhat surprised to see him, grunting that he had assumed that he had dropped the case. Gustave appeared to be a changed man. He had lost weight. His relationship with Yvette seemed to be strained. He no longer smiled. Whenever Clovis visited the farm, the atmosphere was charged with tension.

  The commissioner dropped in at the Grand’ Terre virtually every day. At first Gaston greeted him civilly, offering a glass of wine, which Sébeille consistently refused. Then he became increasingly irritated, to the point of complaining to the mayor of Peyruis that he was being subjected to police harassment. Getting nowhere with this tactic, the commissioner decided to pursue another tack.

  Forgetting his fresh resolve to go softly, Sébeille went to see Paul Maillet shortly after his return to Lurs. He reminded him of the deal they had made on discovering Maillet’s Sten guns. Why then did he pass on the information about Gustave’s confession that Elizabeth Drummond was still alive to Constant and not to him as principal investigator? This was petty minded of the commissioner. After all, Constant was on the scene at Lurs, while he was far away, desk bound in Marseille. Maillet’s offense was compounded in Sébeille’s eyes, moreover, when he heard that Maillet had given even more important information to a couple of gendarmes from Forcalquier, making it seem that the case was slipping out of the hands of the “Maigret of Marseille.”

  Paul Maillet now claimed that sometime between the end of August and the beginning of September he had gone to the Grand’ Terre to buy some potatoes. While Yvette went to fetch them, Gustave had suddenly cried out, “If you had seen it—if you had heard those terrible screams—I didn’t know what to do!” Maillet asked him where he was at the time. Gustave replied, “Over there,” pointing in the direction of the field of alfalfa.24 Yvette came back with the pot
atoes immediately after this exchange, so there was no time to pursue the matter any further. Maillet was somewhat distressed to find that Yvette had charged him for 24 pounds of potatoes but had only given him 13 pounds. Gustave refused to discuss his confession during subsequent conversations with Paul.

  From this moment Sébeille’s suspicion that Gaston was the murderer and that Gustave was probably merely a witness was confirmed. Since the scene of the crime was not visible from Gustave and Yvette’s bedroom window, he could have heard but not have seen the murders. Therefore, if Maillet was telling the truth, then Gustave’s statement that he did not leave the house that night was obviously false.25

  The investigation dragged on for months. A series of false leads were pursued. Anonymous letters piled up. The press was full of wild speculations. Criticism of the police grew ever shriller. The people of Lurs remained obdurately silent and uncooperative. The Dominicis were questioned over and over again, but they stuck to their stories. Sébeille’s investigation seemed to have ground to a standstill.

  Then, at the beginning of July 1953, Sébeille was granted a rogatory commission; in other words, he was given the same rights and powers as the examining magistrate when questioning witnesses. Shortly afterward he was invited to a ceremony by a friend, a primary school teacher from Martigues, who was to receive the Légion d’honneur. At the reception he was introduced to Minister of Justice Léon Martinaud-Déplat, who was also a member of the Chamber of Deputies for the Bouches-du-Rhône.26 The minister asked Sébeille how the investigation was progressing. Sébeille could not have given a very encouraging reply. He had precious little to show after almost a year. Having been singularly lax in collecting material evidence, much to the disgust of British commentators, he had had come to rely almost exclusively on oral testimony. But here he had met with mulish reticence. The minister gave him every encouragement, however, telling him that he should not have listened to Orsatelli, who had ordered him to stop cross-examining Gustave in September 1952. Martinaud-Déplat also assured Sébeille that he would give him every support. That a minister should get so closely involved in a case that was not his direct responsibility is perhaps surprising, but Martinaud-Déplat was a hard-line conservative who was determined to fight the Communist Party at every turn. The party’s close involvement with the Dominici affair was reason enough to arouse his suspicions and his interest.