Recounting the story of her marriage in court, on Thursday, the victim in France’s sensational ‘sleeping rape’ trial mentioned a seemingly small and insignificant detail.
Though Dominique Pelicot began his working life as an electrician, his ex-wife Gisele said, he had loftier ambitions and later became an estate agent in the suburbs of Paris, where they were then living.
This career change appears to have no bearing on the case in Avignon, in which 71-year-old Pelicot is accused of routinely drugging Gisele to be violated by dozens of strangers he met on the internet.
However, her revelation that her husband once worked for a property sales company near the capital is no doubt of great interest to investigators at France’s cold-case murder unit in Nanterre, some 400 miles north.
It may also raise hopes of belated justice for the families of two young women subjected to unsolved sex attacks in the 1990s, one of whom was murdered.
Gisele Pelicot at court yesterday, where she recounted the story of her marriage to Dominique Pelicot in the ‘sleeping rape’ trial
And, in a further twist to a story sending waves of revulsion around the world, Pelicot’s years as an estate agent are linked to a deeply uncomfortable truth for the French police and judicial authorities.
For they inexplicably passed up on a golden opportunity to jail Pelicot – for many years – long before he began sacrificing his unwitting wife to perverted strangers.
I will explain why shortly. But first the clock winds back to the 1990s, when Pelicot was in his 30s. Using the cover of his job in real estate, did he become the French equivalent of Britain’s sinister ‘Mr Kipper’?
Kipper, of course, was the alias used by the bogus house-hunter believed to have abducted and murdered estate agent Suzy Lamplugh, 25, after luring her to a viewing in Fulham, West London, in 1986.
A few years later, two strikingly similar crimes – for which Pelicot is expected to face trial after the rape case is concluded – sent chills through the young professional women of Paris.
Just like Suzy, the victims, Sophie Narme and Estella B. (her surname remains private) were young, ambitious and attractive
girls-about-town who were making their way in upmarket property sales.
And, like Suzy, they were ambushed by a sexual predator using a false name to fix a rendezvous with them at apartments he feigned interest in buying.
Sophie was the first victim. In December 1991, when she was 23 years old, she agreed to meet a man who gave his name as ‘Monsieur Duboste’ for a flat viewing in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, to the north-west of the city.
Soon afterwards her naked body was found, face-down on the blood-soaked carpet, with a belt still fastened round her neck. In a frenzied onslaught, Sophie had been stabbed, raped, and strangled.
Down the years several suspects have been identified, among them France’s most notorious serial killer, Michel Fourniret, now deceased, who murdered British exchange student Joanna Parrish in 1990.
Another notorious character in the frame was Francois Verove, dubbed the Pockmarked Man for his acne-scarred face.
He claimed at least three victims between 1986 and 1994, and probably more, while serving as a police officer, but committed suicide in 2021 as the net finally closed in.
Sophie’s killer was never identified and May 1999 saw the second shocking attack on an estate agent tricked into meeting a supposed potential client alone.
Tellingly, the apartment where Estella B. was set upon is situated in Seine-sur-Marne, a modern Paris suburb 40 minutes’ drive from Villiers-sur-Marne, where the Pelicots lived until 2013 before retiring to the south of France.
Estate agent Sophie Narne was murdered when she went to an appointment at a Paris flat in 1991
Moreover, as the court heard this week, it was when they resided in Villiers-sur-Marne that Pelicot captured a sickening photograph of his own semi-naked daughter, Caroline Darian.
She, too, was allegedly drugged before being dressed in her mother’s underwear and arranged on a bed. But back to Estella B. who, unlike Sophie, survived her appalling ordeal and later told what happened to her.
Soon after entering the flat, she said, her attacker began choking her, then he placed a knife to her neck, and forced her to the floor and rendered her unconscious with an ether-soaked compress.
Somehow, however, the young woman came round and managed to fend him off, whereupon he took fright and fled.
Pelicot, then in his mid-40s, now admits to being the beast who took advantage of Estella’s vulnerability.
He confessed to this in 2022, two years after being arrested for orchestrating and filming the rapes on his wife.
When cold-case investigators questioned him at the Marseille prison where he was on remand, he initially denied any knowledge of the attack.
However, informed that traces of DNA found on one of Estella’s shoes had been run through France’s national genetic
fingerprinting base, and matched the sample he had given after being arrested for the rapes of his wife, he had little choice but to confess.
Yet even then he attempted to play down the seriousness of the attack. As the French newspaper Le Monde disclosed this week, he claimed to an investigating magistrate that he never intended to rape Estella, ‘only to look’ at her.
Despite his protestations, Pelicot was charged with attempting to rape the young estate agent using a weapon.
It is an offence that will inevitably earn him a lengthy jail term, whatever the outcome of the Avignon trial (where he faces a maximum 20-year sentence). Yet, as Le Monde also revealed, for his attack upon Estella, he ought to have been imprisoned 12 years earlier.
Authorities had discovered the incriminating DNA match in 2010, when he was arrested for the first time, for taking photographs up the skirts of female shoppers in a Paris supermarket.
Incredibly, there was what a source close to the case describes as ‘a screw up’: Pelicot was not prosecuted for attempting to rape Estella then – because, under French law, that investigation had been formally closed in 2001.
It remained so for two decades, until it was re-opened and examined afresh by the then newly formed cold-case unit.
Therefore, Pelicot’s only punishment, after that first arrest for ‘upskirting’, in 2010, was a €100 fine.
Were it not for this classic piece of French bureaucratic intransigence, his wife might have been spared her appalling ordeal. A fact she pointed out, with commendable restraint, this week.
So, what of Sophie Narme? Was the young Pelicot, who would have been 38 at the time, also the ‘Monsieur Duboste’ who subjected Sophie to his fatal frenzy?
While the cold-case team refused to comment on the case this week, they appear to believe so, for they have now charged him with her murder.
Evidence against him reportedly includes that of a witness, who says the man who made the flat viewing appointment resembled the young Pelicot.
His description was used for a photofit of the suspect. It shows a man with a broad face, wide-bridged nose, full lips and thick, dark hair styled in a mullet, fashionable in the early 1990s.
Dominique Pelicot is accused of recruiting men online to assault his wife over a ten-year period
Is there a resemblance to the man we have seen shambling into the Avignon courtroom with a walking stick this week? Possibly, though as Pelicot is now jowly and grey it is impossible to tell.
Crime profilers have also apparently detected possible similarities between Sophie’s murder and the attack on Estella, but we are yet to learn what they are.
Pelicot, for his part, vehemently denies killing Sophie, and in her case, there is no DNA evidence. For, in another instance of French investigative incompetence, samples found in the apartment have been ‘lost’.
His lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro, believes the real killer to have been the Pockmarked Man, whom she says refused to take a DNA test before his suicide in 2021.
Mme Zavarro claims Pelicot is being scapegoated by the cold-case unit because they badly need to solve the high-profile murder, and he presents ‘the ideal culprit’.
‘He says he wasn’t there and doesn’t know anything whatsoever about this woman,’ she told me, adding that, with the investigation still ongoing, a trial remained a long way off.
Concerned that it might affect her plea of mitigation, Zavarro believes it is unfair for the Sophie Narme murder case to be raised in the rape trial.
However, under cross-examination this week from a lawyer acting for one of the 50 men accused of raping her, Mme Pelicot was asked whether she believed her husband to be capable of such a crime.
‘I couldn’t imagine him being involved in anything like that,’ replied his wife, who says he was only ever physically violent towards her once – after discovering she had cheated on him with a man at work.
She added: ‘I spent all those years with him, but I’m not the first person who has lived with someone all their lives without really knowing them.’
Yesterday, it was the turn of Pelicot’s daughter –another woman who spent a lifetime with him without discerning his dark side – to address the court.
Ms Darian, who has written a memoir titled ‘I No Longer Call Him Daddy’ and is now a campaigner against rape, sobbed as she remembered the man she once adored.
‘I loved the image of the man I thought he was,’ she said.
‘He was an affectionate dad. There was never an inappropriate look or gesture. This landed on me like a cataclysm. I wish this pain on no one.’
Addressing the judge, she added: ‘How can a person like me get better? How can you ever get better when you know your father is a sexual predator?’
How indeed? But was the monster who took pleasure in videoing his elderly wife being molested also a cold-hearted killer?
Did his depravity take root many years ago, after he swapped his electrician’s overalls for a smart suit and clipboard, and began hawking Paris apartments in a bid to climb the social ladder?
Only after he has been punished for his breathtaking betrayal might we find out whether he really was the French Mr Kipper.
And, if so, whether he was as ruthless as the faceless imposter who lured Suzy Lamplugh to her death.
Additional reporting by Rory Mulholland