Cedric Jubillar was sentenced to 30 years in prison for murdering his wife Delphine. Photo / Lionel Bonaventure, AFP
A woman’s mysterious disappearance in France, which was described as a “perfect murder”, has ended with her husband being convicted of killing her.
Cédric Jubillar, a painter and decorator, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for murdering his wife Delphine, whose disappearance during the country’s Covid lockdown became a national obsession.
After nearly five years of denials, contradictions and televised drama, the verdict, delivered by the Tarn assize court in the southern town of Albi, concludes one of the most closely followed and divisive trials in recent years.
Jurors concluded that the 37-year-old had killed his wife in a fit of rage on the night she planned to leave him for another man and then concealed her body, which has never been found. Nor were there any traces of blood or indications of a crime scene.
Delphine, a 33-year-old nurse, vanished from the couple’s home in Cagnac-les-Mines, near Albi, on December 15, 2020. Shortly after 4am, her husband called police and said: “I don’t know where my wife is.”
He told officers she had gone out to walk their dogs and had never returned. But no one saw her leave, and no evidence ever supported that claim.
Search teams of volunteers, police, divers and drones scoured fields, rivers and woods for weeks, but not a trace was found. Jubillar even helped in the search.
Since her disappearance, France has debated whether Jubillar was a manipulative killer or a victim of over-zealous investigators. Was he a clueless everyman, or a jealous husband cornered by lies?
Throughout the four-week trial, Jubillar’s defence fought bitterly against what they called a one-sided investigation.
In a closing plea, Emmanuelle Franck, his lawyer, described the case as “a machine to crush where bad faith meets incompetence”.
She told jurors: “We have created a criminal to explain a crime. This is a castle of sand. When you cannot prove, you imagine. When you cannot find, you invent.”
The defence ridiculed the prosecution’s reliance on “a pyjama, a pair of glasses, and a few late-night noises” to convict.
Franck argued: “No body, no blood, no trace of a fight. You are being asked to believe that a man who can barely organise his own toolbox executed the perfect crime.”
Prosecutors argued that the disappearance of Delphine, a mother of three, followed a classic pattern of domestic violence – jealousy, control, rage, then denial.
They said Jubillar “exploded” after learning that his wife planned to move in with her lover, a fellow nurse from Montauban.
“To defend the idea of Mr Jubillar’s innocence requires dismissing four experts, silencing 19 witnesses and killing the sniffer dog” that established that Delphine did not leave her home on the night of her disappearance, argued Pierre Aurignac, the chief prosecutor.
He added: “The perfect crime will have to wait. The perfect crime is not a crime without a body, but one for which you are not convicted – and you will be convicted, Mr Jubillar.”
The deepest wounds came from within his own family. His mother Nadine, once his defender, told the court last week she now believed her son to be guilty.
She expressed regret that she had not taken him seriously when he said: “I’m fed up, she annoys me, I’m going to kill her, I’m going to bury her, no one will find her.”
Equally devastating was a letter written by the couple’s son, now aged 11, which was read aloud by his legal guardian.
In it, he referred to his father not as “Papa” but by his full name, “Cédric Jubillar”, and accused him of mistreating both his mother and himself.
He described being beaten, humiliated and belittled, and said he believed his father “did something bad” to his mother. He had witnessed them arguing that night and discussing separation.
The child’s legal guardian told the court the boy was “very, very angry” with his father and held him responsible for his mother’s death. His younger sister, who was 18 months old when her mother vanished, still asks whether “Mummy is alive or not”, the guardian said.
The testimonies of two former girlfriends of Jubillar’s proved crucial. One, known only as Jennifer, said he had confessed to strangling Delphine in the couple’s home when she had visited him in prison.
Severine, another of his former partners, said he had told her he had buried his wife’s body in a burned-down farm. He dismissed this as a joke. Searches following those claims found nothing – but to the jury, the pattern of deceit was overwhelming.
The defence had requested acquittal. Franck, the defence lawyer, implored the court to resist what she called the easy narrative of a jealous husband who killed in anger.
A guilty verdict would mean telling “two motherless orphans… ‘Your father killed your mother’. You must be certain to say such a thing. Can we be certain here?”
Alexandre Martin, her colleague, added that the judges had “the duty to acquit” given the absence of physical evidence.
Pale, and with dark circles under his eyes, Jubillar addressed the court for a final time on Friday to utter one sentence: “I have done absolutely nothing to Delphine.”
But Laurent de Caunes, the lawyer representing the siblings of the missing woman, said: “These are words that are disembodied, like those he has been treating us to since the beginning of this hearing.”
One of the two prosecuting magistrates told the jury that although there was “no body and no blood”, there was “no plausible alternative either”.
Each fragment, they said, pointed in one direction. “No matter how you look at this case, you come to the same conclusion – guilt,” said Aurignac.
For France, where one woman is killed by a current or former partner roughly every three days, the case has reignited debate over how authorities respond to domestic abuse, and whether the justice system is equipped to handle “conjugal disappearances” that leave no trace.
Pauline Rongier, a lawyer representing a friend of Delphine’s, told the jury said the case could prove a “historic” step in the fight against femicide.
The defence said it would appeal, insisting that “reasonable doubt remains overwhelming”.
When the verdict was announced, Delphine’s family hugged and kissed each other on the four benches reserved for the civil parties, where they sat in tight rows. Some cried, while one of her uncles fainted.
“We are all in shock after four years of proceedings,” said Philippe Pressecq, a lawyer for the civil parties. “The jurors rose to the challenge during these four weeks. It is because they followed and understood the case well that they reached an indisputable decision.”
Mourad Battikh, a lawyer for Delphine’s family, said: “Truth has won over lies. It’s a relief.”
Laurent Boguet, another lawyer for the civil parties, said: “Delphine was killed at the hands of her husband. The severity of the sentence can be explained by Jubillar’s attitude during the investigation and the trial.
“In the interests of the children, he should say where he has hidden the body.”