The Dominici Affair
Page 1
“An engrossing investigation of the multiple murder of three English tourists in the French countryside in the 1950s. Martin Kitchen recreates the tangled threads of what was a famous case in its time. Fascinating!”
—Thomas Hoobler, coauthor of The Crimes of Paris
“Martin Kitchen’s meticulous reconstruction of the twists and turns of the Dominici affair, the most sensational murder mystery in 1950s France, is likely to stand as the definitive account of the case. Readers will enjoy not only the story itself but the light this lurid drama casts on life in a remote corner of France and on the ambiguous status, in national life and imagination, of postwar France’s archaic peasant communities.”
—Sarah Maza, author of Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris
The Dominici Affair
The Dominici Affair
Murder and Mystery in Provence
Martin Kitchen
Potomac Books
An imprint of the University of Nebraska Press
© 2017 by Martin Kitchen
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover images: house is from the interior; blood © iStockphoto.com / kirstypargeter.
Author photo © Don Dossett.
The illustrations in this volume originally appeared in the French tabloid Détective, published by Éditions Gallimard.
All rights reserved. Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kitchen, Martin, author.
Title: The Dominici affair: murder and mystery in Provence / Martin Kitchen.
Description: Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017011117 (print)
LCCN 2017026717 (ebook)
ISBN 9781612349886 (epub)
ISBN 9781612349893 (mobi)
ISBN 9781612349909 (pdf)
ISBN 9781612349459 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Dominici, Gaston. | Drummond, J. C. (Jack C.) | Murder—France—Lurs—Case studies.
Classification: LCC HV6535.F7 (ebook) | LCC HV6535.F7 L875 2017 (print) | DDC 364.152/3094495—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011117
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
For Bettina
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Fatal Journey
2. The Murder
3. The Police Investigation
4. Gaston Denounced
5. Confession
6. Two Lives
7. Gaston Dominici Awaits His Trial
8. The Trial Opens
9. The Verdict
10. The Chenevier Inquiry
11. The Case Is Closed
12. Reception
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
1. Pollak and his wife leaving the court on hearing the verdict
2. Gaston Dominici during his trial
3. Gaston in court
4. Gaston rests during the reconstruction of the crime
5. Gaston with Father Lorenzi
6. Gaston, Marie, Gustave, and Yvette at the Grand’ Terre
7. Gendarmerie sketch of the crime scene
8. Gustave and Yvette
9. The Grand’ Terre
10. Edmond Sébeille and Roger Périès
11. Pollak visits Gaston in Les Baumettes
12. Sébeille arrives at the scene of the crime
13. The Drummonds
14. The murder weapon
15. Yvette placating Gustave, who is angered by a journalist
16. Roger “Zézé” Perrin
Acknowledgments
None of this would have been possible without the friendship of the late Jean-Pierre Hamer and of Dominique Lagenebre through whom I got to know Lurs and who introduced me to a number of people familiar with the Dominici affair.
Principal among them was Gérard de Meester, the present proprietor of La Grand’ Terre, to whom I am most grateful for his valuable assistance and generous hospitality. In ten years of exceptional effort he has exorcised and transformed an abandoned ruin into a delightful family home.
I am most grateful to the valuable assistance of the archivists at Boots UK Limited who gave me valuable information on Sir Jack Drummond’s work with the company.
My thanks are due to Martine and Roger Favre for their friendship, help, and encouragement.
Geoffrey Hamm gave me invaluable assistance tracking down archival material in the National Archives Kew.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Vera Yuen from the Interlibrary Loans Department at Simon Fraser University for her incomparable skill in tracking down obscure bibliographical material.
Financial support from the university’s Faculty of Arts is also gratefully acknowledged.
At the University of Nebraska Press I have been ably assisted by Tish Fobben, Natalie O’Neal, Sabrina Stellrecht, and Tom Swanson. Vicki Chamlee undertook the daunting task of translating my text into American English, thereby lending weight to Oscar Wilde’s adage that “we have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.” The faults that remain are entirely my own.
I received invaluable help from my agent Don Fehr and to his assistant Heather Carr.
Last, my thanks are due to Bettina, who has been there from the first time that we visited the site of the Drummond murders in July 1991.
Introduction
In the Times of 6 August 1952 amid news that discussions had taken place between the Egyptian prime minister and the British ambassador over the possibility of a defense scheme for the Middle East, that a peace treaty between Japan and Formosa had been ratified, that workers at the Grand Hotel in Birmingham had gone on strike, and that in county cricket Surrey beat Nottinghamshire thanks to A. V. Bedser’s brilliant bowling, there was a notice of “Three Murdered on Holiday” near “the Alpine village of Lurs, on the right bank of the river Durance.” Although no papers or identification marks were found, a label on a suitcase and the vehicle registration number identified the victims as the distinguished biochemist Sir Jack Drummond, his wife Anne, and their daughter, Elizabeth, aged about twelve.1
At first it was assumed that the motive for this crime was robbery, even though 100,000 francs (about $280) was found under a seat cushion in the Drummond’s car. Police were said to be looking for the owner of a motorcycle with a sidecar that the farmer living close to the murder site had seen about the time of the crime. They were also searching for a deserter from the Foreign Legion, whose uniform had been found some 25 miles away. At first it seemed the case would soon be solved, and Commissioner Edmond Sébeille, a flamboyant, publicity-seeking character who led the police team, told the press that it would not be long before he made an arrest. His statement soon proved to be an idle boast. The initial investigation of the murder site was seriously compromised and vital pieces of evidence ignored. The bodies were moved before official photographs were taken; the site was not cordoned off, so a swarm journalists trampled all over the place; and the gendarmes, basking in the limelight of a sensational murder, allowed themselves to be distracted by their persistent questioning. Suspicion fell initially on the occupants of the nearby farm: Gaston Dominici (seventy-five years of age); his wife, Marie (seventy-three); their son Gustave (thirty-three); and his wife, Yvette (twenty-three). After more than two months of investigations, the police arrested Gustave and charged
him not with murder but for having failed to seek assistance for little Elizabeth, whom he testified still showed signs of life when he saw her in the early morning of 5 August.
Part of the problem was that, as readers of Georges Simenon’s novels will know, French murder investigations emphasize psychological factors and tend to overlook the tedious business of gradually accumulating physical evidence. The search for a motive is the prime concern. In this instance robbery was soon discounted as a possible motive, leaving Sébeille faced with a seemingly motiveless crime. A further complication was that although the commissioner prided himself for his understanding of the peasant mentality, he found himself confronting a wall of silence. There were a large number of unsolved crimes in the area, most of which had to do with settling wartime accounts between resisters and collaborators. Many local peasants possessed illegal wartime firearms, and there was a strong tradition of not getting involved in any police investigation. Months passed without making any progress.
The British press launched a campaign of bitter complaints concerning the French police’s inability to solve a particularly brutal murder of three British subjects. The case has striking parallels with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal in May 2007. Both cases have shown the striking differences between police methodologies and the legal systems in Britain and on the Continent. The implication in the press in both instances was that the British police and legal systems were superior; thereby they overlooked their own spectacular miscarriages of justice, such as the wrongful conviction of Timothy Evans for the 10 Rillington Place murders in 1950, or their own unresolved cases, such as the murder by thirty-six stab wounds of the teenager May Rebecca Thompson in County Durham on 15 February 1952. In 1952 Mahmood Hussein Mattan was hanged for the murder of Lily Volpert. In 1998 the court of appeal ruled that the case against Mattan was “demonstrably flawed” and awarded his family £750,000 ($1,245,000) for this wrongful conviction, thereby setting a precedent for compensating the family of persons hanged for a crime they had not committed. Both British and French courts have relied on confessions obtained under conditions that could reasonably be considered as duress. Timothy Evans and Gaston Dominici were convicted on the basis of confessions obtained under singularly dubious circumstances.
Much has been made of the lack of a presumption of innocence in French civil law, especially in contrast to its central place in Anglo-American common law.2 The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” has a dual purpose: First, as a rule of proof, it obliges the prosecution to prove guilt. Second, it is intended to ensure that no punishment occurs prior to conviction. It is quite true that the accused was afforded little protection under the French legal system. Not until 1897 was the accused permitted to have counsel present when being questioned by the examining magistrate (juge d’instruction). The accused had the right to remain silent, but any refusal to respond almost inevitably resulted in pretrial detention. In 1958, some years after the Dominici trial, pretrial detention was found to be arbitrary and oppressive. It was henceforth only permitted in exceptional circumstances. This ruling did little to change the situation, because most cases were deemed to be exceptional; thus, most suspects had to endure lengthy periods of detention. In 1970 the terminology was tweaked, with “preventive detention” renamed “provisional detention,” but this was a purely symbolic gesture. Suspects in police custody could still be interrogated for up to forty-eight hours without the assistance of counsel. In 1995 President Jacques Chirac, himself in trouble with the law, established a commission under Pierre Truche, the president of the court of appeal (cour de cassation), in response to frequent charges from the European Court for Human Rights: prisoners held in provisional detention were mistreated, lengths of pretrial detention were excessive, and suspects were publicly portrayed as guilty. The Truche report concluded that the presumption of innocence must be strictly respected as an essential and fundamental prerequisite for “human dignity and social harmony.”3
Although lip service is paid to the central role of the presumption of innocence, it is in fact little more than a rule of proof that has little force before the trial. Appalling indignities still are inflicted upon the accused prior to trial. While in custody, little distinction is made between the treatment of the accused and the convicted, and for all the journalistic talk of “suspected murderers,” there is a general assumption of guilt when an arrest is made. That compensation is often paid for wrongful imprisonment indicates the assumption of innocence is often an empty formula. New life urgently needs to be breathed into this cardinal principal of Anglo-American jurisprudence, especially as the rights of the accused are being steadily eroded in a dangerously exaggerated response to the threat of terrorism.
Much is often made of the differences between civil and common law. Those who prefer the confrontational system of common law argue that the accused has a better chance of acquittal, whereas proponents of civil law insist that their inquisitorial system is more thorough and better designed to discover the truth. In common law the judge is presumed to be impartial, whereas in civil law the judge plays an active role in challenging evidence, questioning witnesses, and even in some instances directing police investigations. Under common law the accused’s chances of acquittal depend to a considerable extent on the skill of the defense counsel. Thus, the poor are far more likely to be convicted than the wealthy, as the socioeconomic backgrounds of death row inmates clearly indicate. The often painfully protracted investigations in civil law cases may result in less innocent persons being brought to trial, but the assumption of innocence easily goes by the board. At the end of the day, both systems have strengths and weaknesses, neither are perfect, and both are responsive to societal change.
That the Dominici case was exceptionally badly handled demonstrated the shortcomings of the French legal system in the 1950s, but it was soon reformed. There were comparable appalling miscarriages of justice in the British system at the time as well, so there was no cause for complacency. On the positive side these mishandled cases strengthened the argument for abolishing capital punishment. The guillotine was last used in France in 1977, and the death penalty was formally abolished in 1981. The last execution in Britain took place in 1973 for the capital murder of a British soldier in Northern Ireland, but the death penalty was not abolished for all instances, including treason, mutiny, and serious misconduct in action, until 1998. Both Britain and France are now bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, which forbids the death penalty in all circumstances.
The Drummond murders happened only a few years after the liberation of Provence, and there was still a great deal of unfinished business after the guerre franco-française. Frequent outbursts of violence, murder, and brigandage overflowed from the armed resistance and in the ensuing civil war. The Partie Communiste Française (French Communist Party [PCF]) played a leading role in the antifascist struggle and enjoyed widespread support in the region, a radical enclave in an area known as le midi rouge (the red south).4 The South, anxious to prove its regional identity by staunch republicanism and laicism while remaining sharply critical of Paris, was traditionally left wing. As Cold War tensions grew, the PCF vied with other parties for rural support. The local party first championed the Dominicis as innocent peasants, entrapped by an oppressive judicial system, but it soon felt obliged to back away when public opinion turned against the family.
The involvement of the PCF with the Dominicis, combined with increasing Cold War paranoia, lent weight to a conspiracy theory that Sir Jack Drummond was a British secret service agent who had been assassinated at the behest of the Soviet Union. An alternative explanation for this seemingly motiveless crime was that Drummond had been parachuted into the area during the war with a large sum of money for the Resistance and had come back to pick up whatever remained of this hoard. That the first of these theories was shown to have originated in the fevered imagination of a deranged criminal in a German jail and that the second is demonstrably false
—Sir Jack Drummond was never a secret agent and neither he nor any British agent was parachuted into the area during the war—do not deter those disaffected persons who, for whatever reason, remain stubbornly blind to facts. The century-old adage that, other things being equal, one hypothesis is more plausible than another if it involves a fewer number of new assumptions once again proves its mettle.
Conspiracy theories in the Drummond case still persist in large part due to a desire to assert Gaston Dominici’s innocence. This in itself is a surprising development and is one of the most interesting aspects of the story. At the time of his arrest, he was almost universally regarded as a primitive sadistic brute, a violent patriarch who savagely mistreated his wife and children, and a heartless drunk given to uncontrollable fits of rage. During his trial, he had to be protected from a lynch mob by an extra detachment of police. On his release from prison, the local population fought tooth and nail to stop his taking up residence in his birthplace. Then over the years, his image gradually changed until he metamorphosed into an archetypical peasant, who by hard work and determination established himself as a proudly independent smallholder and maintained his family in modest comfort. The public image of Gaston Dominici thus went from one extreme to the other of the dual nature of the Provencal peasant as represented in the works of writers such as Marcel Pagnol, Jean Giono, and Pierre Magnan. Gaston Dominici could be sturdy, upright, and reliable, but he was also mean spirited, vindictive, and violent. At the time of the murders, he confirmed the urban Frenchmen’s distrust and fear of their rural fellow countrymen. The murder of a distinguished English gentleman and his family by a savage peasant provided them with living proof that their fear of rural life was not the result of paranoia but based on harsh fact. With the passage of time this obsessive fear of rurality vanished, despite many other murders, with some of them being similar to the Drummond case. With the fear and anxiety gone, however, the “Monster of Lurs” was nostalgically transformed into the dignified patriarch of a bygone age. How did this change come about?