The Dominici Affair

by Martin Kitchen

  Discouraged by the barrage of criticism and frustrated by the obdurate intractability of his potential witnesses, Sébeille seemed to have begun losing interest in the case. The autopsy reports were completed on 17 August, but he showed little interest in them. Further, he never bothered to ask any questions about the position of the bodies relative to the line of direction of the shots, and that information might have thrown some light on the sequence of events.

  The following day Sébeille received a telephone call from Marseille announcing that a man named Aristide Panayotou claimed to have witnessed the assassination of the Drummond family and said that he would be able to recognize the person concerned. He was a thirty-five-year-old traveling salesman of cheeses and tarts. He claimed to have the Légion d’honneur (Legion of Honor) as well as the resistance medal and to have been mentioned twice in dispatches. He boasted that he was a descendant of the higher Greek nobility and that he drove a 1948 Lincoln. He had recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and was rapidly losing weight. He spoke in a loud voice with a strong Marseillais accent, which served to accentuate his extreme nervousness.

  Commissioner Harzic brought Panayotou to Lurs, through which he said he had been driving home to Marseille from Grenoble on the night of the murders. His headlights were not working properly. He stopped near the Grand’ Terre to relieve himself. Modestly he opened both doors so he could go about his business as privately as possible. It was then that he heard screams and shots. Panayotou saw a man cross the road, where he bent over someone who was lying on the ground and then retraced his steps. The man wore light-colored trousers and was in his shirtsleeves. He had prominent cheekbones. Panayotou claimed that he noticed that the time was just after one o’clock in the morning.

  Sébeille was at first enormously impressed by this new witness and felt that he had found the key to the whole affair. He confidently announced to the crowd of journalists that followed his every footstep that he would solve the case within eight days. Commissioner Harzic also said that a major step forward had been made.24 But then things began to unravel.

  Panayotou insisted that his identity be kept absolutely secret because he wanted to avoid any publicity and to prevent his wife from finding out where he had been that night. His wife later told the press that it did not matter to her where her husband was or what he did. He was also concerned that he might be charged with failing to give due assistance to a person in trouble. He flatly refused to go with Commissioner Fernand Constant to the Grand’ Terre and see whether he could recognize one of the Dominicis.

  The police, who could not understand why Panayotou had taken so long before stepping forward, quickly concluded that he had made up the entire story. His claims to be a highly decorated aristocrat were shrugged off as a further product of his fruitful imagination. Sébeille suggests that it might well have been that Panayotou was after the 500,000 franc rewards offered by the Sunday Dispatch and Samedi-Soir.25 This idea was taken up by the communist press, which painted him as a money-grubbing mountebank. Professor André Ollivier, a psychiatrist who was director of the police laboratory in Marseille, pronounced Panayotou a fantasist.

  Panayotou was not the only dubious character to appear on the scene. Soon the Grand’ Terre was infested with dowsers, tarot card readers, fortune tellers with crystal balls, spiritualists, and fairground charlatans, all of whom plagued the police with their advice. For some the murderer was tall and thin; for others, short and fat. He came from nearby or he came from afar. He was acting on behalf of a foreign secret service, or it was a personal vendetta. A host of different motives were suggested, none of which threw any light on the case.

  4

  Gaston Denounced

  The Lurs affair attracted the attention of a number of experts who offered their assistance to the police. Scotland Yard was bombarded with notes from psychics who were anxious to help the investigation. Ella Squire had a vision of a man in a Tyrolean hat. Lady Knollys had a nice chat with the Drummonds, who told her that Gaston Dominici had protected them from the murderer, “who had been following them around.” A. L. dreamed that it was the old farmer. The “Bournemouth Tramp” asserted that it was the work of the “Secret Stalin Society.” Mino de Miribel, the premier medium of France, knew that Gaston killed the parents, while Gustave murdered Elizabeth. H. J. Smith, a somewhat predisposed clairvoyant, thought that the murderer was a black American, but unfortunately he did not have time to pursue the case because he was after a Jew in Lowestoft who was rigging the slot machines at a funfair.1

  One dowser claimed that the murderer was a poacher who had crossed the Durance, shot a fox, and dumped it in the well before killing the Drummonds. The gendarmes were skeptical but decided to examine the well. Gaston asked them what they were doing. When they told him, he said, “So you’re looking for the fox my son killed a few days ago?” Gendarme Rebeaudo went down the well and recovered the putrefied carcass of a fox. Gustave said he had killed it with number 6 shot. An autopsy proved him to be correct.2

  Only one of these practitioners of the occult was of any use to the police. According to the police reports, one Jean-Claude Coudouing and his assistant Gaston Beucherie, specialists in “astro-rhabdomancy” from the Institut des Hautes Etudes d’Astrologie, 42 Rue des Marais in Paris, visited the Grand Terre on 1 September. A policeman asked them to look for bullets. They took off with their pendulums and within an hour came back with a bullet that they had found on the slope down by the railway. Commissioner Constant announced to the press later that day that the bullet that had nicked Elizabeth’s ear as she ran away had been found, but he did not say where or by whom. That he could so confidently assert, without any forensic investigation, that it was indeed the bullet in question is a further example of the astonishingly wild assumptions made by the police that are characteristic of the case.

  The bullet was sent to Professor Ollivier at the police laboratory in Marseille. His report was submitted on 4 September, showing that the bullet had indeed been fired from the presumed murder weapon, so Constant avoided any embarrassment. It was a useful piece of evidence but not one that threw decisive light on the affair, beyond showing up the exceptionally slapdash police work in the preliminary investigation of the murder site. Almost four years after the murders, two gendarmes patrolling the road near the Grand’ Terre found an American cartridge that could well have come from the murder weapon as well.3 The police do not seem to have been embarrassed, however, that the shoddiness of their initial investigation of the murder site was thereby revealed.

  Since Sébeille considered Gustave to be the prime suspect, he decided to reconstruct the scene when Gustave had stopped Olivier in the early morning of 5 August and had asked him to inform the gendarmes that he had found a body. Both men stuck to their original versions of events. Olivier insisted that Gustave had emerged from behind the Hillman and was standing in front of the hood. Gustave claimed that he had been standing behind the mulberry tree about 16 yards from the car and that he was about to return to the farmhouse. He flatly denied having been at the scene of the crime.

  The police were waiting for Gustave on 3 September when he returned to the Grand’ Terre on his bicycle. He had been out hunting. A fox and a rabbit were tied to the carrier behind the saddle.4 According to a report in Le Monde, the police had been hampered in their work by a group of locals; thus, they had taken Gustave to the gendarmerie in Forcalquier for further questioning. Sébeille, who was suffering from nervous exhaustion and lack of sleep, let his colleague Fernand Constant and Commissioner Noël Mével, the deputy head of the judicial police in Marseille, conduct the cross-examination; but they were equally unable to get Gustave to change his story. The gendarmes took a break for lunch at one o’clock, and while seated at a table at a nearby inn, they were accosted by Yvette Dominici, who demanded that her husband be released. Captain Albert, the head of the Forcalquier gendarmerie, led her away and questioned her until six o’clock to no effect.

  Gustave
was questioned throughout the afternoon. He finally admitted that he had seen two camp beds: one was on the left-hand side of the Hillman covered by a blanket; the other, across the road, was turned over. He insisted that he had not gone to take a closer look and that he had not seen the bodies. The gendarmes, finding this scarcely credible, decided to detain him overnight and continue their questioning the next day.

  The next morning, as Gustave began to show signs of breaking down, the gendarmes received a telephone call from Sabatier’s superior, Orsatelli, the public prosecutor in Aix-en-Provence, who called for Gustave’s immediate release on the grounds that grilling a simple witness for hours on end was unacceptable. Examining Magistrate Roger Périès and Deputy Pubic Prosecutor Louis Sabatier, both from the district court in Digne, had gone to Forcalquier the evening of 3 September to see whether the gendarmes had managed to glean any information from Gustave. Out of courtesy they had informed their superior, Orsatelli, who was resting nearby at Castellane and recuperating from an accident. He evidently decided that for the moment nothing more could be gained from Gustave and that it was pointless to continue holding him for questioning. Furthermore, it was problematic under French law to hold a simple witness so long for questioning. Gustave was driven back to the Grand’ Terre, where a tearful Yvette flung herself into his arms.

  Gustave complained to the press that he had been mistreated by the police during this grueling cross-examination. Commissioner Constant, fixing him with his piercing blue eyes, had reportedly said, “You are an assassin. We’re going to arrest you and your wife. As for your kid, he’ll be handed over to Public Assistance. If you don’t want that to happen, you’ll have to talk. Tell us what you know.” Gustave told the press Olivier’s statement that he had appeared from behind the Hillman was a fabrication. Gustave repeated that he had been standing on the main road about 15 yards away. He also flatly denied having seen the bodies of Jack and Anne Drummond.5

  The press now presented Gustave as a victim, his name unjustly synonymous with “false witness.” The entire community of Lurs, feeling that it was under suspicion, rallied around Gustave and denounced the policemen from distant Marseille for their ignorance of local customs and mentalities. From Manosque the famous Provençal novelist Jean Giono magisterially announced that contrary to Sébeille’s conviction, the assassin was not from the immediate locality but had come from far, far away. With astonishing disregard for his own denunciation of the bestiality displayed in the settling of wartime accounts, he boldly proclaimed that a Provençal peasant would never commit such a dreadful crime and certainly not a peasant from a close-knit community such as Lurs.6

  A letter appeared under Gustave’s name in the communist newspaper Ce Soir, founded after the liberation by the writer Louis Aragon. It read:

  I am neither a murderer nor a coward, indifferent to the fate of respectable people who were struck down in a mad fury, when I could have gone to their help. Nor am I so lacking in all moral sense that I would protect a monster from the wrath of all decent people. I have therefore decided to seek redress without regard for the rank of those who have done me this unpardonable wrong, whatever their functions or motives . . . my attitude has been above criticism since the tragic events of which we all know. . . . My one misfortune is to have notified the local police. . . . My conscience and my courage have upheld me throughout. I ask no more than the attainment of my aim, that justice shall restore my honor and my peace of mind in the eyes of all.7

  This was clearly not written by the barely literate Gustave but was probably the work of his lawyer, Émile Pollak. This prominent Marseille lawyer and Communist Party member had shown a lively interest in the case from the outset.8

  Sébeille racked his brains to find a possible motive for the crime. Persistent rumors claimed that Sir Jack Drummond had parachuted into France during the war with a large sum of money and that he had come back to collect the rest. Extensive inquiries revealed that there had been such drops in southern France; however, not only were they miles away in the Aveyron but also the British Special Operation Executive officer who acted as the liaison was Lt. Col. Sir Walter Stansfield, known as “Commander Hubert Choeur.”9 Another preposterous rumor suggested that Lady Drummond had played a prominent part in the murder of Adm. François Darlan, the head of the Vichy French armed forces, in December 1942.10

  It was further suggested that a meeting of former members of the Resistance, all of them members of the Communist Party, had taken place on 4 August at the Grand’ Terre, where it was decided that the troublesome foreigners should be removed. One whimsical suggestion was that the meeting was part of a communist conspiracy to smuggle weapons to the Algerian Liberation Front. But this made no sense at all. Jack had not been in contact with the Resistance during the war. There was no evidence that a meeting had ever taken place on 4 August at the Grand’ Terre. If this murder was a contract killing, it would have hardly been done with a broken old weapon by someone who did not even know how to use it.

  Moreover, that the murder was the consequence of a family feud was out of the question. There was no evidence whatsoever of a crime of passion. It was also obviously not the work of a sadistic or sexual maniac. All those in the region who were suspected on either count had been questioned, and their alibis were found to be watertight. Was it perhaps an act of villainy committed by a chance passerby intent on theft but who ran away before robbing his victims because of heavy traffic? This scenario was highly unlikely but still possible. Was the murderer perhaps a poacher who came across the campers by chance? Sébeille’s team interviewed all the local casual laborers, tramps, poachers, snail collectors, and jailbirds, as well as a deserter from the Foreign Legion, but all to no avail.

  Some days previously Commissioner Constant had told the reporters that they now knew the appearance of the assassin but didn’t know his name. His statement seemingly implied that the murderer was not someone from the Grand’ Terre, an impression that was strengthened by the testimony of Henri Chastel, a truck driver from Orpierre in the Hautes-Alpes. He told the police that he had driven past the Grand’ Terre at ten minutes before midnight. He saw a man leaning over the Hillman, peering inside. The man was 5 foot 11, about forty years of age, and sturdily built with tousled hair. Chastel’s testimony was confirmed by Lucien and Georges Duc, truck drivers from La Roche-de-Rame.

  The Duc brothers had been driving their truck to the Cavaillon market during the night of the crime. They passed the Grand’ Terre about half an hour after Chastel had. They saw a man standing near the Hillman at about one o’clock. They gave a similar description and noted that he had a full head of hair and wore a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Standing motionless in the headlights, he appeared to be trying to conceal something in his left hand. Lucien had remarked to his brother Georges the man had an ugly face, and Lucien didn’t want to stop if the man wanted a ride.

  Could this man have been Gustave? Or was it one of the local road menders, a lonely bachelor whose rotten teeth and equine visage matched the description given by Duc? The poor man, who was obviously mentally defective, was subjected to a lengthy grilling, but his alibi was perfect. Anonymous letters also accused Gustave Dominici, but their author was never found. Sébeille finally concluded Gustave was psychologically incapable of such a crime. Sébeille’s suspicions fell instead on the quick-tempered, violent, and egotistical Gaston, but they were not shared by his colleagues in the judicial police. Commissioner Georges Harzic agreed with Giono, saying that a simple peasant from the Basses-Alpes could not possibly have committed such a monstrous crime. Examining Magistrate Périès, who was familiar with incidents of violent crime in the region, was more sympathetic toward the commissioner’s hunch.

  Meanwhile, Henri Conil from Peyruis claimed to have seen a shadow behind the Hillman at 2:15 a.m. Far more significant was the testimony of a Marceau Blanc from Sisteron. He was driving his delivery truck past the Grand’ Terre at about 4:00 a.m. when he saw a camp bed 3 or 4 yards in fron
t of the Hillman. He thought this extremely odd. An hour and a half later another witness claimed to have seen a camp bed on the other side of the road from the Hillman. He also noticed that a blanket covered the windows of the Hillman. By the time the police arrived, it had been removed.

  The press, both in France and England, soon began to lose interest in the case. There were other more pressing issues to address such as the vexing question of German rearmament, which met with fierce opposition in France, and the war in Indochina. The British press made much of Anthony Eden’s marriage to Churchill’s niece, Anne Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, a colorful character with a wide range of friends from all walks of life. The marriage at Caxton Hall attracted a crowd almost as large as that at the marriage of Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding a few months earlier. There were some acid comments from predictable sources about Eden’s divorce and remarriage to a Roman Catholic.