One person who gets an occasional mention in my novels is the juge d'instruction (investigating judge or examining magistrate). Being more concerned with the search for clues, which the judge usually delegates to the police or gendarmes, I don't go into detail, but in the French system, these judges play a vital role. With a view to collating evidence in order to indict a suspect, they conduct interviews, issue warrants, appoint experts, carry out searches and seizures, or order telephone tapping. Most of the time, this is done smoothly and efficiently. But in the forthcoming Sophie Kiesser mystery Painter Palaver, there's a reference to a tragic and infamous case in which the juge d'instruction got it terribly wrong - the Grégory Affair.
In October 1984, the body of the 4-year-old Grégory was found in a river in the east of France with his hands and feet bound and a woollen hat over his face. The murderer has still not been found, a lamentable outcome due in large part to the bungled investigation led by the judge, Jean-Michel Lambert. It was Lambert's first post, and he made the fatal mistake of assuming it would be simple. It turned out to be anything but.
Judge Lambert investigates
To be fair, the Grégory case was just one of over 200 he was dealing with at the time. Nor was he the only one to make mistakes: the autopsy was rushed, and the gendarmes lost a vital piece of evidence, an anonymous letter claiming responsibility for the murder. Nonetheless, Lambert allowed himself to get caught up in the media frenzy surrounding the affair, revealing aspects which should have remained secret, jumping to hasty conclusions, and generally showing an astonishing lack of rigour. According to a colleague, “the procedure was properly ransacked by an incompetent, flippant and ultimately deeply unpleasant magistrate.”
The main suspect in the killing was Bernard Laroche, cousin of the victim's father, Jean-Marie Villemin. Laroche was said to be jealous of his cousin's personal and professional life, more successful than his own. Initially Laroche was accused by his own sister-in-law, Murielle, 15 at the time, who said he had driven with her to pick up Grégory outide his home, where he was playing on while his mother was in the house. Murielle later withdrew her statement, saying she'd been pressured into making it by the gendarmes. When Lambert ordered Laroche's release from custody, Jean-Marie Villemin swore he would get revenge on the man he was convinced had killed his son: true to his word, he shot Laroche dead a few weeks later as he was leaving work.
Convinced that Laroche was innocent, Lambert then indicted Grégory's mother, Christine, though the evidence against her was slim. In a bizarre intrusion into this state of affairs, the esteemed author Marguerite Duras then published a text affirming her belief in Christine's guilt whilst simultaneously excusing her as a tragic figure driven to it by the pressures of a patriarchal society. Needless to say, this was not a helpful contribution.
Though Lambert believed she was guilty, Christine was acquitted, while the case itself was removed from Lambert, by now thoroughly discredited, and given to another judge. Lambert went on to have an uneventful career, both as a judge and as an author of detective novels. But the Grégory Affair haunted him all his life: three years after retiring, having just sent his latest novel to his editor, he took his own life in precisely the way described in the novel, asphyxiated by a plastic bag, an empty whiskey bottle on the floor beside him.
Will we ever know who killed Grégory? I doubt it. The case drags on to this day, with new analyses of DNA traces undertaken just a few days ago, but after all this time, with so many mistakes made from the outset, it seems unlikely the truth will ever be known. In Painter Palaver, it gets no more than a passing mention, but in France it has given rise to dozens of books, both by journalists and by the protagonists themselves. Not that Sophie Kiesser has ever read them - she has her own mysteries to solve.