Gisèle Pelicot may not be her husband’s first victim, according to the police

In December, A court sentenced to Dominique Pelicot Until 20 years in prison for drugping his wife Gisèle and inviting dozens of men to his room to violate her between 2011 and 2020.

The trial stunned to France and made Mr. Pélicot The most infamous sexual predator in France. His wife, Gisèle, became a feminist icon.

But the police and prosecutors suspect that she was not her first victim. “Gisèle Pelicot fears that she is just the tip of the iceberg,” said one of Mrs. Pélicot’s lawyers, Antoine Camus, in an interview.

While Mr. Picot was in prison waiting drugged, telling the police: “It’s me.”

He is also being investigated for the violation and murder of a 23 -year -old woman in 1991. Mr. Pélicot has denied any participation in the murder. But prosecutors accused him in 2022 for both crimes, who are so similar that they have been bent in one case.

Both victims were young real estate agents in the Paris area. Both were violently attacked with a blade, tied, drugged with ether and the lower part of their bodies stripped. In both scenes of the crime, the victim’s shoes were perfectly located in the room.

A test date has not been established.

Today, Mr. Pélicot, 72, is imprisoned in southern France, not far from the town where he and his wife, now divorced, had retired. But in 1991, Mr. Pélicot was working as a real estate agent in Paris, and in 1999 he had taken a job as a fire and telephone systems alarm seller.

The woman who was killed, Sophie Narme, had been working for a month in her first job as a real estate agent when she was killed.

On the night of December 4, 1991, his employer discovered his lifeless body and partially naked on a floor of the upper floor that had shown an earlier customer that morning in the nineteenth -century Paris. Police suspect that the client was Mr. Pelicot using a false name.

They detected a strong smell of ether in the crime scene and during the autopsy. They had hit her, drugged, stabbed, strangled with her own belt and violated, according to investigation documents read in the court during her trial last year.

Although the crime scene showed traces of violence, with the content of the bag of Mrs. Narme scattered around the room, her high heel shoes were found carefully placed next to the body.

Eight years later, in 1999, a 19 -year -old real estate agent met with a possible client on the last floor of an apartment building in the Paris region for what was supposed to be a routine visit to look at a unit of rent. The client, to whom the authorities suspect again was Mr. Pelicot using an alias, asked him to take some measures on the floor.

When she turned her back on her, he held her to the ground, forced her to her belly, tied her wrists with a rope and pressed a cloth of ether in her nose, according to the victim’s lawyer, whose name has not been revealed . She tried to contain her breath while he was drugged.

He removed high heel shoes, carefully placing them aside. He remembered having felt a cash cutter against his skin while his attacker squeezed his throat with his arm.

“I was still slow to the product that had made me inhale,” the woman told the investigators according to the documents of the case read in the court. “I couldn’t turn around, I remember that I felt like a prisoner in my own body. I didn’t want you to see I was awake. I felt I couldn’t move. “

But the effects of the drug soon disappeared, and the victim fought against his attacker and then managed to hide in a warehouse for hours, blocking him from the inside. His attacker finally left.

Police collected traces of their blood on their shoes and on the carpeted floor. But for years, they did not progress. In 2011, the case was removed.

He only reopened when he was linked to the case of murder of Narme.

During the last 34 years, Florence Rault, the lawyer of the mother of Mrs. Narme, had continued following the case of murder, regularly asking the court to analyze test pieces or explore new potential clients.

“I was doing it for Sophie,” Rault said. “I promised his mother that we would reach the end of this story and that he would not die before knowing the name of his daughter’s murderer.”

Already in 2004, the police had already made a connection between the two cases. But at that time, the national system that classifies the criminal record of DNA had just created and was barely functional.

The Forensic Institute lost sperm traces found in the 1991 crime scene in charge of analyzing the sample.

In 2010, Mr. Pélicot was first arrested for filming women’s skirts in a shopping center in the Paris region, using a hidden camera on a pen. They left it with a fine of 100 euros, equivalent to approximately $ 104.

He was caught doing it again in 2020, in a supermarket in southern France. But this time, the Security Guard encouraged the victims to present an official complaint, allowing the police to conduct investigation.

It was then that the police say that they linked Mr. Pedot’s DNA with the 1999 violation attempt.

Mrs. Rault is now the lawyer of that case too. Through Mrs. Rault, the woman who survived said she had moved and did not want to speak publicly about the case. However, he dedicated himself to legal procedures and faced Mr. Pelicot in 2023 as part of the investigation.

By then, Mr. Pélicot had confessed many details of the rape attempt. He told the Police that he had gone to a real estate agency in Paris because he wanted to have an idea of ​​his former job and review the prices of rentals.

He said he acted for “impulse” After meeting with the agent and establishing an appointment to visit the apartment. Then he returned to his car to get the rope and what he described as “a product to clean the 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 she wanted to look at her naked body while avoiding any violence.

“I tried to forget that for a long time,” he added. “I apologize for lying, it was difficult to admit.”

His lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, said the statement to the police did not equal a “formal recognition” of the crime.

“He acknowledges the materiality of making him fall asleep, he does not recognize to wear a knife and explain that if all this happened it was not with the main intention of violating it,” he said.

French media have also reported That the police are investigating two similar cases of 1995 and 2004, although the police have not been questioned by the police about them, said their lawyer.

Regarding the murder of 1991, Mr. Pelicot has repeatedly denied any connection. “There is no way to let go because he really doesn’t want to be recognized as a murderer,” said his lawyer. “Because he is not a murderer.”

Catherine Porter Contributed reports.