Convicted rapist Dominique Pelicot linked to 33-year-old murder in Paris

The murder of a young woman has been on French prosecutors’ desks for 33 years but police have a fresh suspect – a 72-year-old jailed for his role in one of the world’s biggest rape trials.

A courtroom artist’s sketch of Dominique Pelicot, who was jailed for his role in one of the world’s biggest rape crimes. Image: AFP

Three weeks before Christmas 1991, young real estate agent ­Sophie Narme was showing a client around a stylish apartment in Paris’s 19th arrondissement.

She had met the man, who had given his name as Monsieur Duboste and was thought to be in his 30s, at 10am to take him round the property. She never returned home.

That evening, her employers, alerted by her worried parents, found her lying face down on the apartment’s blood-soaked floor, her hands bound.

She had been strangled with her Chanel belt and stabbed in the stomach, probably with a box-cutter, according to her family’s lawyer. The killer had used chemical submission with a cloth soaked in ether. Her bra was torn and she had lost all the rings on her fingers in an apparent struggle against her attacker.

The case has been on French prosecutors’ desks for 33 years but police are now taking a fresh look with a new suspect in mind: Dominique Pelicot, the 72-year-old grandfather jailed last week for 20 years for his role in one of the biggest rape trials the world has seen.

The 50 other men also tried for the rape and sexual assault of Gisele Pelicot, 72, were found guilty after a three-month trial, receiving sentences between three and 20 years – some of which were criticised as too lenient.

There are now questions about other crimes allegedly committed by Pelicot over decades – and whether they could have been prevented.

Florence Rault, a lawyer who represents Narme’s family, said she is “convinced” Pelicot’s dark history extends far beyond raping his wife and inviting more than 70 men to violate her.

“You don’t become a predator at 60,” said Rault, who sat at the back of the courtroom sporadically throughout Pelicot’s trial. “I am convinced that we don’t know everything about this man.”

Pelicot has been placed under formal investigation in Nanterre because of his proximity to where Narme’s body was discovered at the time, and the similarities between her murder and the attempted rape of another estate agent, known only by the pseudonym Marion, which Pelicot has admitted, in a nearby area almost a decade later.

The Pelicots settled in the Villiers-sur-Marne suburb of Paris after they married in 1973 and raised their three children while Dominique worked as an estate agent and electrician.

The couple divorced for financial reasons in 2001 but continued to cohabit and remarried in 2007. They retired to the village of Mazan in southeastern France in 2013.

French media outlets reported in September that investigators planned to compare Pelicot’s DNA to that found at the scenes of attacks on six other female estate agents across France between 1991 and 2004. Five were raped or sexually assaulted and one was murdered.

Narme’s mother, who is in her 80s and has not spoken publicly, has never given up the fight to find out who killed her daughter.

“Her mother is very old and frail, and her memory is impaired,” Rault said. “However, she firmly expresses the desire to know who killed her daughter.”

Although crucial DNA evidence has been lost in Narme’s case, Rault, who also represents Marion, is confident Pelicot is connected: “This assault is an exact copy of the assault that Sophie Narme was the victim of. I remain convinced that Marion would have suffered the same fate as Sophie if she had not been lucky enough to escape him.”

Pelicot strongly denies any involvement in Narme’s rape and death. His lawyer, Beatrice Zavarro, said in January last year the accusations were “based solely on connections”. When the case was referenced during the Mazan trial, Gisele Pelicot was stunned by the idea that her husband could have attempted to rape a woman the same age as their daughter.

Marion, then 19, was lured to an apartment in the Seine-et-Marne region of Paris by a man who claimed he wanted to buy it. The man was “friendly” and “presentable”, Rault said, and Marion was not suspicious In the bedroom, the attacker asked Marion if his bed would fit in the apartment. When she bent to take measurements, she felt a blade on her neck and felt the effects of ether, according to French media reports. She tried to resist breathing in the chemical and managed to disarm her attacker before running away and locking herself in a wardrobe.

Now 43, Marion identified Pelicot as the assailant in October 2022 as police investigated the Mazan rapes. She picked him and one other man out of a grid of nine photos and recognised the smell of ether as being that of the substance the man had placed over her mouth.

It was revealed during the Mazan trial that Pelicot’s prolific attacks on his wife were only uncovered because a guard working at a supermarket in Carpentras spotted him filming up women’s skirts and encouraged the women to press charges.

Yet a decade earlier, in 2010, Pelicot was arrested for filming under women’s skirts in a shopping mall near Paris, using a camera hidden in a pen. He was fined for the offence and obliged to provide a DNA sample. His wife was never informed.

After his arrest, a public prosecutor in Paris was asked to compare this DNA sample with the 1999 file as Marion’s case remained open. The prosecutor’s office says it never received this request, so Pelicot’s connection to both crimes went unnoticed.

A year later, Pelicot started recording videos of himself and other men raping Gisele.

Gisele Pelicot. Picture: Clement Mahoudeau/AFP

“If Pelicot had been unmasked in 2010, he could have been convicted for the 1999 case and he would never have been able to commit the crimes against his ex-wife,” Rault said.

It was only after Pelicot was stopped in 2020 for the second upskirting offence in a supermarket, this time in southern France, that the DNA was checked again by “tenacious” investigators in Nanterre, Rault said. The more thorough investigation resulted in the discovery of the hundreds of videos of Gisele being raped, leading to the mass rape trial. His DNA sample was run through the system again and a match was found with traces of blood on the shoes Marion was wearing the day she was assaulted.

Rault said the guilty verdict against Pelicot was “predictable”, but her fight for justice for Narme and Marion continues. She has had to battle to keep the cold cases open, facing a lack of interest from investigators and judges. In the past Narme’s murder has been connected to the notorious French rapist and serial killer nicknamed Le Grele, or “the pockmarked man”. “What I am waiting for now is to see what the ongoing investigations will bring,” Rault said.

Meanwhile, Marion has kept herself away from the news of the Pelicot trial, refusing to watch television or read newspapers.

“She was very affected when she had to immerse herself in that nightmare day she lived in 1999 during her attack”, Rault said. “She protects herself as much as possible.”

THE SUNDAY TIMES