Cedric Jubillar is accused of murdering his wife, Delphine Jubillar, in a fit of jealousy, but denies the charges. Photo / Lionel Bonaventure, AFP
It has all the hallmarks of a hit TV murder drama.
A brave nurse vanishes at the height of the Covid-19 crisis.
Detectives believe they have a motive, but try as they might, find no evidence of the murder itself – no traces of blood, no crime scene and no body.
All they have to go on is a broken pair of glasses and the sketchy testimony of her 6-year-old son.
Yet the case of Delphine Jubillar is no fiction and has gripped France ever since the 33-year-old mother-of-two disappeared from the family home in Cagnac-les-Mines in Tarn, southwestern France, on the night of December 15, 2020.
At 4.09am, her husband, Cedric Jubillar, called police and said: “Hello, I don’t know where my wife is”.
In the following days and weeks, searches by volunteers, dog handlers, divers, archaeologists, cave explorers, specialised military personnel, forensic teams, and drones yielded nothing.
Ever since, the “Jubillar affair” has led to countless theories being hotly debated on social media, with self-styled investigators claiming to have cracked the case.
“In the past, discussions about current events tended to take place in the bistro. Now, with Facebook, Twitter and the like, we are in a globalised cafe,” said Patrick Eveno, professor emeritus of media history at Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University.
“There were those for and against Jubillar, and all these people, all over France, communicated with each other every day. It became something incredibly important,” said Frederic Abela, author of a book on the murder, Jubillar: the Unfinished Investigation. “Everyone had their own version of the truth.”
Almost five years on, the case came to court this week in the town of Albi, where a shaven-headed Jubillar, now 38, told a packed courthouse: “I deny the accusations against me”.
The painter and plasterer faces life in prison on charges of murdering his wife in a fit of jealousy because he could not bear her leaving him for another man.
Yet throughout the probe, he denied killing Delphine, with his lawyers denouncing a “prejudiced investigation”.
However, police did ascertain that the couple were on the verge of a tense separation.
The day she disappeared, Delphine could reportedly no longer stand her husband, a heavy cannabis smoker who spent his time playing video games, their scruffy brick house still under construction, with debts she plugged through her nurse’s salary. “Redneck car, Redneck house,” she complained to friends.
She had a lover, a married man. The pair met secretly and planned to live together.
Cedric Jubillar could not accept the idea of being left, tracked her movements, checked her credit card statements, searched her phone and discovered car rentals, hotel reservations and lingerie purchases, investigating magistrates said in the indictment.
“She’s p***ing me off, I’m going to kill her,” he reportedly told a friend with whom he went fishing and played pétanque.
“I’m fed up, I’m going to kill her. I’m going to bury her, no one will ever find her,” he allegedly told his mother.
On December 15, 2020, Delphine Jubillar took the day off and changed her Pin to prevent her husband from using it, prosecutors say.
That night, between 7.15pm and 10.55pm, she exchanged numerous text messages with her lover, sent him a photo of herself in lingerie and placed a wine order for their next date, according to investigators.
The last signal from her phone was emitted from the family home. Then nothing.
Six months after his wife’s disappearance, Cedric Jubillar was taken into custody after police ruled out suicide and other leads.
He maintained that he fell asleep alone in his bed while his wife and son watched a television programme together, and was woken up by his daughter’s crying at 3.45am. By then, he said, his wife had left without a trace. Cedric told police his wife had gone out to walk the dogs that evening, but no evidence has supported this claim.
In court, prosecutors described the victim as a “shy and caring” woman initially in the shadow of her “arrogant” and overbearing husband, but who gradually gained assurance as the household’s main breadwinner, a role reversal they say he found hard to tolerate.
But Beyond the circumstantial, the prosecution has scant evidence to go on.
Police found Delphine’s pair of glasses, broken into three pieces, with a smashed frame, on the kitchen high table, and the missing arm behind the sofa.
Their 6-year-old son told them he heard his parents arguing that night and saw them grappling with each other “between the sofa and the Christmas tree”, and his mother saying, “Stop it” and his father saying, “Then we’ll separate”.
There were the “screams of fear” heard by a mother and daughter living 150m away, and the couple’s duvet and cover both hastily washed “because the dogs urinated on them”.
The couple had two Shar Peis named Gnocchi and Oprah. Gnocchi is believed to have since died while Oprah was placed in a rescue home after Cedric’s arrest.
In their indictment, investigating judges described Jubillar as a “liar” who protested his innocence but boasted in prison about “leading the investigators up the garden path”.
Two of his acquaintances – a former cellmate and a former girlfriend – told police that Jubillar confessed to the murder and even told them where her body was. But after more digging, no body has been found, and the defence is expected to raise doubts about the veracity of the pair’s accounts.
“The prosecution is trying to construct a story, to create a motive, a character that would fit the actions he is accused of,” said one of Jubillar’s lawyers, denouncing the “lack of evidence” in the case.
The trial is expected to last four weeks, with 65 witnesses called and 11 experts. More than 16,000 pages of evidence have been compiled.
Seeking to explain why the case has captured the public imagination, the regional newspaper Ouest France said: “The Jubillar affair is the story of ‘Mr and Mrs Average’, a middle-class couple in their thirties who are experiencing marital difficulties … like thousands of others in France.”
Thibault de Montaigu, a writer, suggested in Le Figaro newspaper it was akin to “a novel by Georges Simenon”, the legendary French crime author and creator of the fictional detective Inspector Maigret.
For all its twists and turns, he said the underlying question was how a “red-eyed, fuzzy-brained guy who smoked 10 joints a day could have carried out the perfect crime”.
He added: “Killing his wife without leaving the slightest trace; secretly transporting her body, burying her in an unfindable location, then coming back to tell the police – all while his two children slept quietly in their bedrooms.
“And this was a guy who greeted the cops in panda pyjamas and then played Game of Thrones on his phone the very morning of the disappearance.
“So, genius bluffer, lucky fool or poor innocent?”
In court today, the legal guardian of the Jubillar children, Louis, 11, and Elyah, 6, told the court the eldest was today a “quiet” child who was “very, very angry” with his father, whom he blamed for his mother’s disappearance.
She said his sister, who was 18 months old at the time of the tragedy, spontaneously said that she loved him and asked him “to say whether her mother is alive or not”.
“The first person who can help them do so is you, Mr Jubillar, by answering their questions,” she said, turning to the accused, who nodded his head in agreement from the dock.
The verdict is due on October 17.
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