In December, Court convicted Dominique Pelicot Up to 20 years in prison due to his wife Gisèle’s drug and calling dozens of men to their bedroom to rape it between 2011 and 2020.
Trial Astonished France and turned Mr. Pelicota into French most notorious sex predator. His wife Gisèle became Feminist icon.
But police and prosecutors suspect that he was not his first victim. “Gisèle Pelicot fears that she is just the tip of the iceberg,” said one of Mrs. Pelicot’s lawyer, Antoine Camus, in an interview.
While Mr. Pelicot was in a prison who was waiting for his trial, police faced DNA evidence that connected him to the attempted rape of a 19-year-old woman in the Paris region in 1999. After an hour of interrogation, he admitted that he drugged her, saying to the police, “That’s me.”
He is also investigated for the rape and murder of the 23-year-old woman in 1991. Mr. Pelicot denied any involvement in the murder. But prosecutors accused him of 2022 of both crimes, which are so similar that they are folded into one case.
Both victims were young real estate agents in the Paris area. Both were violently attacked with a blade, bound, drugged with an ether, and the lower part of their bodies collapsed. In both scenes of crime, the victim’s shoes were found neatly placed in the room.
No trial date was determined.
Today, Mr. Pelicot, 72, was closed in southern France, not far from the village where he and his wife, now divorced, withdrew. But in 1991, Mr. Pelicot worked as a real estate agent in Paris, and by 1999 he took over a job as a salesman for fire alarms and telephone systems.
The woman who was killed, Sophie Narma, worked for a month in her first job as a real estate agent when she was killed.
In the evening of December 4, 1991, her employer discovered a lifeless, partially demolished body in the upper floor apartment, who showed the client earlier that morning at the 19th Arrondissement of Paris. Police suspect the client Mr. Pelicot using a false name.
They discovered the strong scent of ether at the crime scene and during autopsy. She was beaten, drugged, stabbed, strangled with her own belt and raped, according to investigative documents read in court during his trial last year.
Although the crime scene showed traces of violence, with the contents of Mrs. Narma’s purse, scattered around the room, her high -heeled shoes were found carefully placed next to the corpse.
Eight years later, in 1999, a 19-year-old real estate agent met a potential client on the upper floor of the apartment building in the Paris region for what was to be a routine visit to look at the rental unit. The client, whom the authorities suspect again, used the pseudonym, Mr. Pelicot asked her to make some measurements in the apartment.
As she turned her back, he nailed her to the ground, forced her to her stomach, tangled his wrists with a rope, and pressed the fabric covered with an ether on his nose, according to a victim lawyer, whose name was not published. She tried to hold her breath as he drugged her.
He took off her high -heeled shoes, carefully putting them aside. She remembered that she felt the cutter of the box on her skin as her striker squeezed her throat with her hand.
“I was still slow from the product that made me breathe,” the woman told investigators according to the documents about the cases read in court. “I couldn’t turn around, I remember feeling like a prisoner in my own body. I didn’t want to see I was awake. I felt I couldn’t move.”
But the effects of the drug soon worn out, and the victim struggled from her attacker, and then managed to hide herself in the warehouse for hours, locking him inside. Her striker eventually left.
Police were collecting traces of his blood on his shoes and carpets. But they have not made progress for years. In 2011, the case gave up.
It only opened only when it was associated with the case of the murder of Narma.
For the last 34 years, Florence Rault, a lawyer of Mrs. Narma’s mother, continued to follow the murder case, regularly asking the court to analyze the evidence or to investigate new potentials.
“I did it for Sophie,” Mrs. Rault said. “I promised my mother that we would reach the end of this story and that he would not die before we know the name of his daughter’s murderer.”
As early as 2004, police had already established a link between two cases. But then a national system was created that classifies DNA criminal files and is barely functional.
Sperm traces found at the 1991 crime site lost the Forensic Institute in charge of analysis of the sample.
In 2010, Mr. Pelicot was first arrested for shooting women’s skirts at a shopping mall in the Paris region, using a camera hidden in a pen. He was discharged with a fine of 100 euros, which is equivalent to about $ 104.
It was caught again in 2020, at a supermarket in the south of France. But this time, the security guard encouraged the victims to file an official appeal, allowing the police to conduct an investigation.
At that time, police say that Mr. Pelicota DNA linked to a rape attempt in 1999.
Mrs. Rault is now a lawyer for the case. Through Mrs. Rault, the surviving woman said she was moving on and that she did not want to talk publicly about the case. However, she participated in legal proceedings and clashed Mr. Pelicota in 2023 as part of the investigation.
Until then, Mr. Pelicot confessed to many details of the rape attempt. He told the police that he went to the real estate agency in Paris because he wanted to feel his old job and check the prices for rent.
He said he had acted on “impulse”, After meeting agents and determining meetings to visit the apartment. He then returned to his car for a rope and what he described as a “head of the head restraint” – an ether bottle.
“I did not plan to have relations with her,” he told the research judge, explaining that he had drugged her because he wanted to look at her diverted body, avoiding any violence.
“I tried to forget that for a long time,” he added. “I apologize for lying, it was hard to admit.”
His lawyer, Béatrice weldro, said that a statement did not represent the “formal recognition” of the crime.
“He admits the materiality that she is asleep, does not admit that he wears a knife, and he explains that if all this happened, it was not with the primary intention that she was rape,” she said.
French media also reported The police have been studying two similar cases from 1995 and 2004, although Mr. Pelicota police have not questioned them, his lawyer said.
As for the 1991 murder, Mr. Pelicot repeatedly denied any relationship. “No way he’ll let him go because he really doesn’t want to be recognized as a killer,” his lawyer said. “Because he’s not a killer.”
Catherine Porter contribute to reporting.
