She should have had a star destiny, an incredible career and photographers at her feet, but life decided otherwise: at only 25 years old, the young actress Pauline Lafont died during an unexpected drama, which held France in suspense during the summer of 1988. At the time in full glory, the daughter of Bernadette Lafont, from whom she inherited the beauty and the banter, goes for a walk in the Cévennes mountains, where she is from. A ride from which she will never return.
Alerted by his absence, it was his brother David who alerted his family and then the emergency services and even went so far as to speak to the President of the Republic, François Mitterrand, so that the investigation did not stop. The last to have seen her alive, he immediately declares that at breakfast, the young woman wore a light red dress, perfectly adapted to the crushing heat of this summer of 1988.
The research drags on, the hypotheses get carried away but the answers arrive three months later: by chance, a shepherd ends up finding the young woman in a ravine, only a few kilometers from the family home. Fallen ten meters, she would have died on the blow of a landslide, an accident which appeases the journalists who had developed the craziest theories, not hesitating to attack her mother sometimes.
A questioning blue jogging
However, a question remained unanswered: why was the young woman found dressed in jogging when her brother had always declared that she had left in a dress? Difficult to know, even if we can assume that in reality, the young woman went back up to change to go for a walk, finding her dress probably too light for the mountains.
In any case, the blue jogging is an important element of the case: it is he, in part, which was used to recognize the young woman whose corpse was decomposing. The family would have identified the clothes, then an important ring before the teeth were examined to ensure that the young woman was indeed the right person.
Today, the answer to this question has still not been found, but David, the victim’s brother, struggled to grieve: “My son David said to me afterwards: ‘These mountains, I hate them.’ I replied: ‘Not me. Because the mountains, they killed her, but they kept her‘” told Bernadette Lafont, a year after the tragedy.