A police cortège thought to be transporting Dominique Pelicot arrives at the courthouse before a hearing at the cold case unit in Nanterre, west of Paris, in January. Photo / Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP
Dominique Pelicot became notorious after being convicted of drugging his wife and inviting strangers to rape her. Police say his crimes may have started long before.
In December, a court sentenced Dominique Pelicot to 20 years in prison for drugging his wife Gisele and inviting dozens of men to their bedroom to rape her between 2011 and 2020.
The trial stunned France and turned Dominique Pelicot into France’s most infamous sexual predator. His wife, Gisele, became a feminist icon.
But police and prosecutors suspect that she was not his first victim. “Gisele Pelicot fears that she herself is only the tip of the iceberg,” one of Gisele Pelicot’s lawyers, Antoine Camus, said in an interview.
While Dominique Pelicot was in prison awaiting his trial, police confronted him with DNA evidence linking him to the attempted rape of a 19-year-old woman in the Paris region in 1999. After hours of questioning, he admitted to drugging her, telling police: “It is me.”
He is also being investigated in connection with the rape and killing of a 23-year-old woman in 1991. Pelicot has denied any involvement in the killing. But prosecutors indicted him in 2022 for both crimes, which are so similar they have been folded into one case.
Both victims were young real estate agents in the Paris area. Both were violently assaulted with a blade, tied up, drugged with ether and the lower part of their bodies undressed. In both crime scenes, the victim’s shoes were found neatly placed in the room.
No trial date has been set.
Today Pelicot, 72, is jailed in southern France, not far from the village where he and his wife, now divorced, had retired. But in 1991, Pelicot was working as a real estate agent in Paris, and by 1999 had taken a job as a salesperson for fire alarms and telephone systems.
The woman who was killed, Sophie Narme, had been working for a month in her first job as a real estate agent when she died.
On the evening of December 4, 1991, her employer discovered her lifeless, partly undressed body in a top-floor flat she had shown to a client that morning in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris. Police suspect the client was Pelicot using a false name.
They detected a strong smell of ether at the crime scene and during the autopsy. She had been beaten, drugged, stabbed, strangled with her own belt and raped, according to investigation documents read in court during his trial last year.
Though the crime scene showed traces of violence, with the content of Narme’s purse scattered across 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 prospective client on the top floor of an apartment building in the Paris region for what was supposed to be a routine visit to look at a rental unit. The client, whom authorities again suspect was Pelicot using an alias, asked her to take some measurements in the flat.
As she turned her back, he pinned her to the ground, forced her on to her belly, bound her wrists with a rope and pressed a fabric covered in ether to her nose, according to the lawyer for the victim, whose name has not been disclosed. She tried holding her breath as he drugged her.
He took off her high-heeled shoes, carefully placing them on the side. She remembered feeling a box cutter against her skin as her attacker squeezed her throat with his arm.
“I was still sluggish from the product he’d made me inhale,” the woman told investigators according to case documents read in court. “I couldn’t turn around, I remember feeling like a prisoner in my own body. I didn’t want him to see that I was awake. I felt I couldn’t move.”
The effects of the drug soon wore off, and the victim fought off her attacker and then managed to hide in a storeroom for hours, locking it from the inside. Her attacker eventually left.
Police collected traces of his blood on her shoes and on the carpeted floor. But for years, they made no progress. In 2011, the case was dropped.
It was only reopened when it was linked to Narme’s murder case.
For the past 34 years, Florence Rault, the lawyer for Narme’s mother, had continued to pursue the murder case, regularly asking the court to analyse pieces of evidence or to explore new leads.
“I was doing it for Sophie,” Rault said. “I made a promise to her mother that we’d get to the end of this story and that she wouldn’t die before knowing the name of her daughter’s killer.”
As early as 2004, police had made a connection between the two cases. But back then, the national system classifying DNA criminal records had just been created and was barely functional.
Traces of sperm found at the 1991 crime scene were lost by the forensic institute in charge of analysing the sample.
In 2010, Pelicot was arrested for the first time for filming up women’s skirts at a shopping mall in the Paris region, using a camera hidden in a pen. He was let off with a fine of €100 (about $180).
He was caught doing it again in 2020, in a supermarket in the south of France. But this time, the security guard encouraged the victims to file an official complaint, allowing police to conduct an investigation.
That is when police say they linked Pelicot’s DNA to the 1999 attempted rape.
Rault is now the lawyer for that case, too. Through Rault, the woman who survived said she had moved on and did not want to talk publicly about the case. She did, however, engage in the legal proceedings and confronted Pelicot in 2023 as part of the investigation.
By then, Pelicot had confessed to many details of the attempted rape. He told police that he had gone to a real estate agency in Paris because he wanted to get a feel of his old job and to check out prices for rentals.
He said he acted on “impulse,” after meeting the agent and setting up an appointment to visit the apartment. He then went back to his car to get the rope and what he described as “a product for cleaning headrests” – a bottle of ether.
“I wasn’t planning to have relations with her,” he told the investigating judge, explaining that he drugged her because he wanted to look at her undressed body while avoiding any violence.
“I tried to forget that for a long time,” he added. “I apologise for lying, it was difficult to admit.”
His lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro, said the statement to police did not amount to a “formal recognition” of the crime.
“He acknowledges the materiality of making her fall asleep, he does not acknowledge carrying a knife, and he explains that if all this happened it was not with the primary intention of raping her,” she said.
The French media have also reported that police are looking into two similar cases from 1995 and 2004, although Pelicot has not been questioned by police about them, his lawyer said.
As for the 1991 murder, Pelicot has repeatedly denied any connection. “There’s no way he’s going to let go because he really doesn’t want to be recognised as a killer,” his lawyer said. “Because he’s not a killer.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Segolene Le Stradic
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