The Dominici Affair
Page 20
Gustave was the first to confront his father. With his denunciation having been read out aloud, he was asked whether it was true. After a long silence, he emphatically denied it. Then, addressing his father, he said, “He only had to tell the truth.” Quite what he meant by this remains a mystery. The truth would be his undoing if he were guilty. If his father were innocent, where was this “truth” that could absolve him?
Gaston’s lawyers asked that Gustave be questioned once more about what he had done during that fatal night. Périès refused without giving any reason for his demurral.
Pollak then asked Gustave why he had denounced his father. He replied that he had been forced to do so by the police. Asked why he had now retracted his statement, he gave yet another of his enigmatic replies: “Because there are some witnesses who bear me out.” Neither the examining magistrate nor Gaston’s lawyers pursued this point. Gaston beamed with delight at his son’s retraction, but his mood changed abruptly when Clovis was brought into the room.
Clovis stuck to his story of a drunken Gaston’s row with Marie and his confession that he had “bumped off” the Drummonds. He had no answer when asked whether Gaston had told him what had led him to shoot the Drummonds. When he was reminded that he had given a different answer on previous occasions, he admitted that he had been told that Sir Jack had tried to wrench the gun from Gaston and that it had gone off by mistake. Asked about his father’s remark that he had killed three people and would kill a fourth if need be, Clovis said that he assumed that his mother, Marie, was the next one on the list.
Gaston went into a towering rage and denounced his son as a “fucking bastard,” a Judas, a bandit, a base liar, and a “Bazaine,” adding that “if there had been a weapon at the Grand’ Terre, it was you who brought it!”12 Clovis, who was all too familiar with such treatment by his father, muttered, “You’ve made us suffer far too long!” The defense lawyers took this as evidence that revenge for past injustices was Clovis’s motive for concocting an accusation against his father. Clovis was now sent home, while Gustave and his father remained at the law courts although kept apart. Having been given something to eat, Gaston was taken back to prison. He appeared to be in good cheer, remarking to one of the warders, “Young man, I’ll be back on my farm in the spring!” It is difficult to see quite what were the grounds for such optimism.
In the afternoon Gustave was questioned by Sébeille, but no record was kept—a fact that the defense team took as evidence of intimidation. Périès took over at six o’clock, and Gustave collapsed, claiming that he had been incapable of denouncing his father face to face. He asked that he not have to go through such an ordeal ever again. Périès, imagining that Gustave was in a cooperative mood, tried to get him to admit that he was outside at the time of the crime and that he had seen his father. Gustave flatly denied that he had been in the alfalfa field during the shootings. Getting nowhere and possibly attempting to mollify him, Périès offered Gustave a taxi to take him home.
Despite having reverted to his original denunciation of his father and repeating it on numerous occasions, Gustave proclaimed his father’s innocence on every possible subsequent occasion. On 19 January he posted a letter, written on 10 January, to his father, who had been moved to Les Baumettes prison in Marseille for psychiatric evaluation:
Dear Dad,
please excuse me, but I am suffering terribly. I think of you more than ever and I promise you to be strong and to tell the truth, even in the face of threats. The truth must come to light.
Périès pointed out on 4 February that Gustave hereby admitted that he had previously not told the truth and that he had been subjected to unspecified threats. Did they come from within the family, or were they from the police?13
Gustave replied that the purpose of the letter was to tell his father how sorry he was that he had falsely accused him. He now told Périès that he knew absolutely nothing about the circumstances of the crime. Also, he claimed that his father had never told him that he had murdered the Drummond family. He stated categorically that he had seen the carbine for the very first time on 6 August 1952, when Commissioner Sébeille showed it to him.
He now gave yet another version of the night of 4–5 August 1952. He had gone to bed at eleven o’clock but had woken up half an hour later when a motorcycle stopped at the farmhouse. Then he fell asleep again, only to be woken by several shots. He heard screams in the distance, and the dogs began to bark. He realized that the shots did not come from a hunter but were from either a revolver or an army weapon. He and Yvette speculated as to what might have happened, and he was unable to get back to sleep. He heard nothing inside the house until his father got up at four o’clock, but he had heard a couple of cars pass by the farm about a quarter of an hour after the shooting. There were others, but much later.
Gustave said he got up at about five o’clock, drank a cup of coffee, gave the horse some fodder, and then went to look at the landslide. He had not been able to decide on which side of the Grand’ Terre the shots had been fired. Was it toward Peyruis or in the direction of the Lurs railway station? Then he thought perhaps the English family had been attacked. To settle his curiosity, he went to the campsite but did not see anything unusual. There was a bit of a mess around the car, but that was all. It was only after he had crossed the bridge across the railway that he saw the little girl. Her arm moved. He then went back to have another look at the campsite. Just as he reached the main road, a motorcycle passed. Then he decided to go back to the farmhouse, walking along the side of the road. At that moment Olivier appeared, and he flagged him down.
Disregarding the fact that Gustave could not have seen Elizabeth’s body without walking deliberately across the path and peering down the slope toward the river, Périès asked him to elaborate on the accusations he had made in his letter dated 10 January to his father about the threats the police had made to him. He reassured Périès that the examining magistrate had always treated him correctly and that he was merely complaining about the way the police had treated him on 12 and 13 November 1953, during the reconstruction of the crime scene and his father’s arrest. He had only told the same story to Périès that the police had extracted from him by extreme measures. Gustave had failed to share that detail because he was frightened of being sent to prison were he to contradict himself. He ended on a pitiable note by telling Périès that he had always treated him “like a brother.”
Gustave thus retracted all his previous statements doubtless for fear of his father, as well as due to intense pressure from his wife and the Dominici clan. He had reverted to his original story. His strategy, whether conscious or not, was to introduce some fresh piece of evidence that might lead to further confusion. During this session he had suggested that a revolver might have been fired that night and that two cars had passed by shortly after the shootings. This was something that he had previously specifically denied. Such tactics were frustrating both for the police and Gaston’s defense team. As Pollak said despairingly, “Amidst this hodgepodge of lies, contradictions, retractions and telling silences concocted by the clan, which accumulated during the months of enquiry, there were precious few grains of truth.”14
With Gustave having retracted his accusations against his father, Périès decided to go ahead and confront him that same day with Clovis, who doggedly stuck to his story. Périès began this tense session by telling Clovis that his brother, contrary to his previous statements, now claimed to know absolutely nothing about the crime perpetrated against the Drummond family. He now insisted that his father had never admitted to the murders and that he had never known about the existence of an American carbine at the Grand’ Terre.
Clovis replied that part of the Dominici family was taking Gustave for a ride. Having himself received a death threat from his brother Gaston, Clovis was hardly surprised that Gustave had changed his tune. He repeated his statement that when he had told him that the carbine was no longer in the shed, Gustave had said that he had already not
iced that it was missing. Clovis had then asked him whether he had used it to commit the crime. Gustave replied that he had not.
Questioned on this point, Gustave confirmed what his brother had said, whereupon Périès pointed out that only moments earlier he had denied knowing about the carbine before 6 August 1952. Gustave was trapped. He had to admit that he had seen the weapon in the shed, as he had shown to the police on 16 November, but asserted that he had only seen it once, shortly after his brother Aimé married and left the family home.15 Then Périès reminded Gustave that in a previous statement he had said that he had first seen the weapon in early 1952 but that Aimé was married in December 1950. Gustave was unable to explain this discrepancy. In reply to another question he said that he had no doubt that Clovis suspected him of the murders. Clovis interjected that when he had asked him whether he was involved in the shootings, Gustave had replied that their father had acted alone and had confessed to Gustave in the early morning of 5 August as he was setting out to take his goats to pasture. Clovis claimed that he had not taken any notice of this, because he could not imagine that the old man could possibly have committed such a terrible crime. However, at heart he still believed that Gustave was guilty. His suspicions did not dissipate until his father told him that he indeed had shot all three of the Drummonds.
Gustave now felt obliged to retract the statements he had made earlier to the effect that his father had never spoken to him of his guilt. He stated that he should have told Clovis that his father had admitted to the crime “that very day.” It was not until the conversation at Saint-Pons, shortly after he was released from prison, that he had heard that their father had made a similar admission to Clovis. When Périès asked why he had lied earlier that day, Gustave simply shrugged his shoulders.
Périès was an exceptionally self-effacing and tolerant man, but he was rapidly losing patience with Gustave and decided to talk to him alone. After Clovis left the room, Périès gave Gustave an unaccustomedly harsh dressing down: “Your behaviour in this affair has been absolutely unacceptable. Even if the contradictions and denials might possibly be considered admissible before 15 November last, they certainly are not now that your father has admitted that he murdered the Drummond family.”16 He pointed out that on 13 November Gustave had stated that his father had admitted to the crime, but at first he had denied having ever seen the carbine. He had said the opposite the next day and then retracted once again by stating that he had only seen the gun once or twice shortly before 5 August 1952. On 5 December 1953 he had claimed that his father had confessed to the crime at four o’clock in the morning of 5 August 1953. After a confrontation with Paul Maillet on 17 December, he had changed his story, saying that his father’s confession was made at two o’clock in the morning. This point he confirmed on 28 December, only to retract it two days later when confronted by his father. Later that same day he had taken it all back once more, claiming that he was frightened of accusing his father to his face. Today he had started by saying he knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding the crime and that his father had never confessed to him. As soon as Clovis entered the room, however, he went back to the original version of his story.
Gustave replied that since his father’s arrest his family had continuously harassed him. His brothers, sisters, and sisters-in-law simply refused to believe that his father could have possibly committed such a crime, and they took him to task for having denounced him to the police. He had repeatedly told them that his father had confessed to him at two o’clock in the morning of 5 August 1952, about an hour after the shootings. They simply did not believe him. Gustave said that he was desperate and did not know what to do. He had written to his father only to cheer him up. Gaston was, after all, his father. He had worked all his life for the family. For this reason Gustave was incapable of repeating what his father had said that morning in his presence.
Périès decided to get back to the question of the carbine. He pointed out that when questioned at the law courts in Digne on 15 November 1953, Gustave had stated that it had been at the Grand’ Terre ever since some American troops passed by during the war. Gustave claimed that this was simply speculation on his part since he was away from home at the time on a mission with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français. He repeated that he had only seen it once, and that was shortly after Aimé’s marriage in December 1950, when they cleaned the shed after his departure from the Grand’ Terre. No other member of the Dominici clan, apart from Clovis, had known of its existence. Gustave had never dared ask his father about the weapon for fear of getting yet another brutal tongue-lashing. Clovis had said that there was one magazine, but he had seen two. When Périès asked Gustave which of his family members had dictated the letter he had written to his father, he adamantly replied that it was all on his own initiative. Exhausted after this long and frustrating encounter, Périès let Gustave go home.
Lucien Tardieu questioned Aimé Dominici. Although he remembered having seen the Americans visit the farm, he stated he had never seen the weapon.
Gustave was again cross-examined on 23 February. Périès suggested that Gustave had told his family that he had only denounced his father after he had heard that Clovis had already done so.17 Gustave eagerly took up this suggestion, saying that he had first heard of his father’s guilt from Clovis. Périès pointed out that shortly after Gaston’s arrest, Gustave had testified that Gaston had confessed to him at two o’clock in the morning of 5 August 1952 and that he had told the entire family about it. Gustave, repeating what he had said less than three weeks previously, replied that a few days after his release from prison in November 1952, he had told his family what his father had said. No one believed him. His father claimed that he was innocent, and Gustave’s sisters all told him to stop accusing him. Gustave claimed to have asked himself whether his father could have possibly committed such a terrible crime and whether Gaston’s confession was perhaps all a vivid fantasy induced by his drunken state. Gustave’s testimony on this point, as in many other instances, varied widely. Sometimes his father was represented as calm and collected, at other times he was highly nervous and agitated, and now he was drunk. Périès asked why Gustave continued to accuse Gaston although he repeatedly insisted on his innocence. He did not reply directly; instead, he referred to the carbine, which all the rest of the Dominici clan claimed never to have seen. In yet another version of the story, he now maintained that when he had seen it in the shed some three to six months before the crime, he had asked himself how it could have got there but that he never asked anyone about it.
With Gaston in prison, the Grand’ Terre was run by Yvette’s father, François Barth. Quite why this was necessary is not immediately apparent. On the one hand, Gustave was admittedly something of a caricature figure—a feebleminded, mendacious, and pigheaded peasant with a blank expression and an oafish smile who was completely under the influence of a strong-willed and attractive wife. On the other hand, as the Grand’ Terre was a very small farm, there was not much to do during the winter months. Barth was every bit the authoritarian Gaston was. He was not only a militant communist with connections throughout the area but also a man of integrity and a competent administrator. It was said that the party faithful frequently held meetings at the farm, but nothing is known of what transpired.18
Clovis had written to Barth at the end of January, asking him to do what he could to persuade Gustave not to withdraw his denunciation of his father. He should blame “the old scoundrel” for all “the wrongs he has made us suffer.” It is indeed surprising that Clovis should have written such a letter to Barth, who was one of the most outspoken champions of Gaston’s innocence. When Périès questioned him on this score on 4 February, Clovis replied that he feared that Yvette and his sisters, by asserting that Gaston was innocent, were pointing the finger at Gustave whether they realized it or not. Clovis insisted that Gustave would be absolutely incapable of committing such a crime, and he wanted to warn Barth that he was putting his son-in-law
in serious danger.19 Périès reminded Clovis that Gustave had spoken to him of his father’s guilt a couple of days after the murders, and Clovis made the astonishing reply that he had forgotten “that detail.” Périès was scandalized by this inappropriate remark, which Clovis tried to explain away by saying that at that time he had imagined that Gustave had committed the crime. The examining magistrate did not ask why that although he had once suspected his brother, he now thought Gustave was temperamentally incapable of perpetrating such a violent crime.
Clovis said that he had written the letter to Barth at his wife’s prompting but that he was entirely responsible for its contents. He had signed it and taken it to the post office. Périès did not ask why he had written to Barth rather than going to talk to him. After all he was Yvette’s father, lived only a few miles away, and was a fellow member of the Communist Party.
Gaston’s daughter Clotilde Araman was the next person Périès questioned.20 She staunchly upheld her father’s innocence. She had written a letter to Gaston dated 25 November that ended with this enigmatic phrase: “You have already arrested an assassin and are definitely about to arrest a second, but unfortunately for you that would bring you too many laurels.” Périès asked her what she meant by this. She replied that it was a reference to the role Gaston had played in arresting the bandit, Luigi Gualdi, in 1923.21 Périès then asked her whether Gaston was in a position to secure the arrest of the Drummonds’ murderer. She replied, “If he had been able to do so.” She went on to say that her sister Germaine Perrin and her brother Clovis were plotting against their father out of sheer spite.