The Dominici Affair

by Martin Kitchen

  Making little sense of Clotilde’s perplexing answers, Périès decided to ask Gaston about the letter he had written in response to his daughter. He began by asking what he meant when he wrote: “Misfortunes always come from the same direction.” Gaston leaned forward and, almost whispering, replied, “I’ve been thinking. I have the impression that my grandson Roger [Zézé] Perrin might be the assassin. He’s a con artist.”22

  Périès, who was unable to get Gaston to say anything further on the subject, decided to question Zézé Perrin.23 He was no more able to make sense of young Perrin’s web of lies, contradictions, and trickery than had Sébeille and the police beforehand. However, no one felt that Zézé’s almost pathological inability to tell the truth was due to his involvement in the crime.

  During his earlier questioning of Clovis regarding his letter to Barth, Périès had told him that his father had said that the carbine belonged to him and that he had perhaps lent it to Zézé Perrin.24 Clovis denied this categorically, and Périès never returned to this line of questioning.

  On 9 February, at the request of Gaston Dominici’s defense team, Périès had ordered an examination of all the weapons that the Dominici family possessed to compare the oil used in them with that in the M1. Clovis’s and the Perrins’ weapons were requisitioned along with those at the Grand’ Terre. Maillet’s guns were not deemed to be of interest. The report from the police laboratory delivered on 9 March showed that there was no similarity between the oils used in the M1 and Roger Perrin’s two 16-gauge shotguns, but two of Clovis’s three weapons had traces of a similar type.

  Armed with this information, Périès went to visit Clovis, who said that he only used olive oil of his own making to lubricate his guns. According to Périès’s notes, Clovis had used oil from the 1953 harvest on his guns, but there was none left. Périès took a sample of the 1954 oil with him. (Clearly there is a mistake here in the record. Olive oil is pressed in the autumn, but these tests were made in February or March.) The experts had difficulty in analyzing the oil in the Rock-Ola, because it had been in the water for several hours. It was therefore not possible to say with absolute certainty whether it was identical with what Clovis used. The prosecution did not pursue the matter, possibly because it might well have weakened their case against Gaston. But the defense team also did not see fit to refer to this piece of evidence. Clovis had not been at the Grand’ Terre the night of the murders and was never a suspect.

  Périès visited Gaston in his cell at Les Baumettes on 21 April for a final interrogation. He found Gaston calm and collected. He was confident that he would be acquitted and that he would soon return to the Grand’ Terre in glory, just as his hero Napoleon had returned from Elba. He understandably brushed aside the examining magistrate’s reference to an incident in 1897 when he had hit a neighbor viciously over the head, leaving him bedridden for days, and another fight he had had with neighbors in 1925.

  The dossier was formally closed on 27 April 1954 and sent to the chamber of indictment at the court of appeal in Aix-en-Provence, which was to decide whether the case should go to trial in an assize court before a jury.

  Three jurists from the court of appeal presided over a hearing in private at which both the prosecution and the defense presented their arguments. Émile Pollak, who led the defense team, realized he had little chance of securing a dismissal at this stage. He felt his only hope was to convince a jury of his client’s innocence. Nevertheless, he made a desperate attempt to get the case dismissed on procedural grounds. In his submission to the court, he argued that the law of 8 December 1897 required that a suspect be indicted as soon as the charges against him were sufficient. Once indicted the accused had the right to have an attorney present when being questioned. Gaston Dominici should therefore have been indicted before the reconstruction of the crime on 16 November so that he would then have benefited from legal advice during the reenactment of the crime.

  At the court of appeal Gaston’s case was handled by the specialist lawyer André Mayer, who argued along lines suggested by Pollak. He insisted that since the reconstruction added nothing new, the indictment should have been made against Gaston beforehand. He also pointed out that when Gaston was interrogated for the last time, no one mentioned to him that the dossier had been given to his lawyers. In addition, there was no evidence that the clerk of the court had formally notified the defense team of the writ of committal. The appeal judge, Maurice Patin, was a distinguished expert in penal law known for his passionate defense of civil liberties. He conceded these last two points but insisted that Périès’s delay in indicting Gaston was due to caution rather than a deliberate attempt to deny the suspect of his rights.

  The court ruled that Périès was guilty of a minor infraction of the 1897 law and therefore set aside Gaston’s final confession and the writ of committal. These two instruments were sent to the court in Grenoble for revision. The net result of this action was a further postponement of the trial. This reversion to a higher court gave Gaston a brief respite from prison. He traveled to the Dauphiné capital at public expense. It was a welcome change of scenery.25 Shortly after his return to prison in Digne, he was informed that his trial had been set for 17 November 1954.

  8

  The Trial Opens

  Gaston appeared in court on Wednesday, 17 November 1954, at 9:15 a.m. with a red-and-blue scarf around his neck, his hair closely cropped, and his mustache carefully trimmed. In daily life his baggy velvet trousers fell on his hips, revealing a flannel waistband, a blue shirt, and a leather belt. He usually wore a woolen vest under a loose jacket. Now he was dressed in his best suit, a blue cotton shirt with a new tie, and a herringbone overcoat. His flat hat was planted squarely on his head. He projected a reassuring air of the naive simplicity typical of a French peasant, patriarch, and grandfather of sixteen grandchildren. He was, in short, the clichéd image of a santon, an image d’Épinal, or a figure like Mr. Seguin from Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin.1 Jean Giono, the chronicler of Provençal life, who was present at the trial, said of Gaston: “I know a thousand Dominicis. They are interchangeable.”2

  Giono and the playwright Armand Salacrou were given places of honor to observe the trial. Other distinguished guests included the prefect of the Basses-Alpes; the typographer Maximilien Vox, who had begun to convert Lurs into one of the most desirable villages in Provence; and Madame Pélabon, wife of Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France’s cabinet secretary, who was said to be the prime minister’s designated observer at the trial. The famous writers François Mauriac, André Maurois, and Simenon were expected to attend the trial, but they failed to appear. A hundred journalists from all over the world were present.

  The court of appeal in Aix had courteously contacted the British Consulate General in Marseille to ask whether it should reserve a seat at the trial for a member of the staff. The Foreign Office felt that it would be inconvenient for the consul to spare a member of his staff for several days, was concerned that it would involve unnecessary expenses, and argued that it might well look as if it had no faith in the French legal system were a member of the consular service to attend.3

  Gaston’s entrance was greeted with a barrage of flashbulbs as photographers fought to get a shot of the accused. The resulting pandemonium prompted the presiding judge to order all photographers to leave the room. This was met with shrieks of protest. Initially five minutes had been allotted for photographs, after which the use of flash was to be forbidden. The presiding judge, Marcel Bousquet, who had arrived from Nice the previous day, then called a halt after thirty seconds. It took some time for the press to calm down.

  From the outset it was the dossier, rather than Gaston, that was on trial. Public Prosecutor Louis Sabatier from the Digne bench and Advocate General Calixte Rozan from Aix-en-Provence, vigorously assisted by Judge Bousquet, set out to defend the dossier and to disguise its many holes and deficiencies, while Émile Pollak, Pierre Charrier, and Léon Charles-Alfred were determined to expose
its lacunae and weaknesses. At stake was Gaston’s head.

  The selection of the seven jurors took some time. The defense objected strenuously to the choice of a woman, arguing that the case involved the brutal killing of a ten-year-old girl and that a woman could not possibly be objective in such a matter. The objection was sustained.

  The clerk of the court then read out the charges. He began with a description of the accused as a man who was “authoritarian, a drinker and secretive.”4 Gaston protested, then sat back with a sigh of resignation. The clerk reminded the court of the chronology of events. On 5 August 1952 the Drummonds had been murdered. In November 1952 Gustave had been convicted for failing to render assistance to Elizabeth. That month Clovis had heard his father admit to the murders. In November 1953 Gustave had accused his father of the murders and then retracted his statement. Clovis stuck to his original version. When the clerk suggested that Gaston might have seen Lady Drummond undressing, the old man smiled salaciously and stroked his mustache. Only Elizabeth’s murder was considered to have been premeditated.

  Next came the naming of witnesses. At first it seemed that Yvette, Gustave, and Clovis had vanished, but they were soon found. They explained that the crowd was so dense that they had been unable to enter the courtroom. Aristide Panayotou was present, cutting as strange a figure as ever. Since he had led the police down the garden path, many found it surprising that he was there at all. Zézé Perrin, the pathological liar, was present, with the defense lawyers anxious to have a crack at him. The entire Dominici clan, with the exception of the traitor Clovis, was lined up for the defense.

  The presiding judge then called for an intermission. The photographers rushed toward the box. Gaston thumbed his nose at them and hid his head. His lawyers came to talk to him.

  The court resumed at 10:30 a.m. Pollak rose to his feet, bitterly complaining that vital evidence had been withheld from the defense. The Hillman had been returned to England, so it was not possible to examine it. He had not seen the camp beds. He expressed his outrage that he had not been permitted to witness the reconstruction of the crime on 16 November 1953.5 The advocate general suggested that a similar model Hillman be made available, but Pollak insisted that it had to be the Drummonds’ own car. The advocate general then suggested that the British consul in Marseille be asked whether it would be possible for the Hillman to be returned to France. The court adjourned to deliberate until 11:05 a.m. It was then announced that the station wagon could not be sent back. The next day Katherine Elliot from Weston-super-Mare, who had bought the car for £650 ($1,820) and put it in her wax museum in Blackpool, charging morbid holidaymakers one-shilling admission, offered to send the vehicle to Digne; but the suggestion was refused.

  The presiding judge then launched into a biographical sketch of the accused. He reported that the mayor of Lurs had said that Gaston lived “on the margins of society” and hardly ever went to the village. Gaston testily replied that he had work to do. Bousquet said that Gaston was “easily roused and impulsive.” Gaston countered that he did not like to be mocked. He was then reminded that he had hit a man with a cudgel, causing serious injury. Gaston shrugged his shoulders and said that the incident had happened fifty-six years ago, and anyway the other person had hit him first. He was then accused of being too severe with his children, to which he replied that he had never hit them, and anyway “if a father is not severe with his children, what’s going to happen, eh, Mister President?” The judge then suggested that Gaston was unduly hard on his son Gustave. Gaston noted that he got everything that he wanted. His son took all the farm produce and never gave him a cent for it, even though his father had made the farm what it was. Anyway, Gustave was a bone-idle liar.

  The accused initially appeared to be remarkably relaxed and self-confident. His arms were crossed as he leaned back with his head resting on the wood paneling. Constantly chewing on lumps of sugar, he stared fixedly at the presiding judge with the air not of someone who was on trial for a triple murder but of a worthy peasant about to receive a medal for a lifetime of hard and honorable work. But he soon began to tire under the presiding judge’s relentless grilling.6

  It is doubtful whether there was ever a judge so inordinately fond of the sound of his own voice as Bousquet was. He would interrupt witnesses to make laborious analyses of what he imagined the witness was trying to say, often to no apparent purpose and frequently in a misleading manner. He fired a seemingly endless series of questions at Gaston, most of which he had great difficulty in understanding. Words such as “prolixity” and “susceptible” did not exist in his vocabulary. When Madame Muzy, the Ganagobie schoolteacher who had taught his children, described him as “crafty,” “authoritarian,” “hard,” and “severe,” he took all four as compliments. The problem of language soon became central.

  There were many instances when the court was unable to understand the exact meaning of local slang. Zézé Perrin, for example, said that he had lied to the police because he was afraid “d’être marroné.” A Parisian would understand that he was afraid of being beaten up. For Jean Giono, however, it meant “get dressed down,” “have a strip torn off him,” or “get yelled at.” In prison jargon, it meant “get nabbed by the police.”7 In these cases, the witnesses were never asked precisely what they meant.

  From the outset, the presiding judge adopted a blatantly accusatory tone, which most of the journalists present found shocking. British journalists, who had no reason to be sympathetic to Gaston Dominici, found it outrageous that a French judge should treat the accused in a manner sadly reminiscent of Prosecutor General Andrei Vyshinsky in the Moscow show trials or Roland Freisler, president of the Nazi People’s Court. They assumed that this behavior, although regrettable, was normal practice in a French court. French journalists, however, were equally appalled by this court’s blatant lack of objectivity.8

  The proceedings were conducted in an atmosphere of mutual incomprehension. Not only did Gaston Dominici speak a Provençal dialect and had great difficulty in understanding standard French, there was also the extreme clash between the mentality of the peasant world and that of the urban jurists. The gulf between urbs and rus—the urban and the rustic—could barely be spanned. Technical legal language and hermetic procedures mystified most of the journalists present as well. They were utterly incomprehensible to those whose vocabulary was largely restricted to rural colloquialisms. Even in a conversation conducted at a common intellectual level, a large part of that which is communicated is nonverbal. Socially conditioned gestures, inflections, and facial expressions have also to be understood. In the theatrical setting of a law court, such factors are of even greater significance.9 Gaston frequently overacted, failed to notice the traps that were set for him, and shrugged off a number of accusations in the absolute certainty that he would be acquitted. In a few instances his peasant cunning enabled him to score a point against the president and the prosecution, but most of the time it was impossible to determine whether his reactions were due to sheer incomprehension, or to certain assurances he had been given, or to a determination to assert his innocence. French law has no provision for a milder sentence should the accused enter a guilty plea, so the police could have given him precious little in the way of assurances.

  Heavily indebted to Jean Giono’s account of the trial, the literary theorist and semiologist Roland Barthes was to argue that since the material evidence was uncertain and often contradictory, the court attempted a reconstruction of Gaston Dominici’s mentality in terms of a universal psychology “descending from the charming empyrean of bourgeois novels and essentialist psychology.” The trial, in short, was a literary construct. A further problem resulted from the myth of the transparency and universality of language, as evidenced when Gaston and Judge Bousquet frequently talked in different languages and at cross-purposes.10

  This form of psychology is “adjectival” in that the accused is treated as an object with certain attributes such as selfishness, irascibility, lechero
usness, or cunning magisterially attributed to it. Le Monde described the prosecutor as an “extraordinary story-teller” of “dazzling wit.” Edmond Sébeille waxed eloquent in his summary of the case: “Never have I met such a dissembling liar, such a wary gambler, such a shifty narrator, such a wily trickster, such a lusty septuagenarian, such a self-assured despot, such a devious schemer, such a cunning hypocrite. . . . Gaston Dominici is an astonishing quick-change artist playing with human souls, and animal thoughts. . . . This false patriarch of the Grand’ Terre has not just a few facets, he has a hundred!”

  Justice, for Barthes, here took on the mask of realist literature, with the accused robbed of his language and transformed into a literary construct. He thus saw the trial as a confrontation between the highly educated readers of Le Figaro and a primitive peasant, between the cultured and the uncouth. It was a blatant example of hegemonic power and class justice. This was an elegant expression of a widely held view.

  After a two-hour pause for lunch the court resumed at 3:00 p.m., and Gaston was questioned about his life. Toward evening he began to tire, to the point of becoming a sad, pathetic old man, desperately proclaiming his innocence. The accused stated that he had heard three or four shots at 1:10 a.m. on 5 August 1952. He imagined that they had been fired by poachers on the other side of the Durance. He got up at 3:30 a.m. but saw nothing. Having taken his goats to pasture, he returned to the farmhouse at 7:30 a.m., and Yvette told him that a crime had been committed.