In this personal and compassionate book, titled What I never told, Radio-Canada star legal journalist Isabelle Richer, takes us behind the scenes of the trials that shook Quebec. With these selected stories, she offers readers the opportunity to accompany her in her encounters with victims, their families and police investigators, and to go well beyond the daily report by shedding particular light on the human.
Spending almost 25 years scrutinizing criminal trials allows you to accumulate an incalculable wealth of knowledge. But this baggage sometimes weighs very heavy, when certain horrible memories continue to haunt, long after the condemned man has seen the prison door close behind him.
To get rid of the burden of these terrible stories, Isabelle Richer, now host of the television program that bears her name, has written down 22 accounts of trials that have marked her, hoping to “free” her mind and her brain.
Why not have already told everything?
For lack of time on the air, or because information only came to her ears well after the trial was held, she explained in an interview, in a small cubicle, a few meters from her work table in the Radio-Canada building in Montreal.
Also out of modesty. “How much horror can you express in acceptable words on television? »
“And then, there are things that settle in us, years later,” adds the headliner of the network.
Reflections and anecdotes
This book is not the linear account of several trials: that, she has already done on the air. Nor is it a critique of the justice system, but rather “fragments of stories that particularly troubled me,” she says.
The writing is precise, sober and unadorned. The different chapters take the reader into the world of the journalist, where police inspectors reveal details of an investigation in the corridors of the courthouse and where the mother of a victim confides after a day of hearing.
The story can be a source of many reflections, fueled by the journalist’s often surprising anecdotes, and her own questions, such as this: “should we favor rehabilitation or punishment? “.
Several factors influenced the choice of stories she decided to tell. Some because they shook her violently, like heinous crimes committed against children, or because she sometimes identified with the victims — I know this bar, it could have been me —, others because that she was struck by the courage and dignity of these assaulted women.
Still others have been selected because they had surprising “correspondences” with his own life. In 2015, Isabelle Richer was hit by a car while riding her bicycle. A head trauma and cervical fractures imposed a rehabilitation process on him. At the Rehabilitation Institute, the tragic case of Annie Pellerin came back to her mind. Stabbed repeatedly, the young woman of 22 years had been left for dead in a Harvey’s restaurant in Montreal. For the journalist, walking with difficulty in the same corridors evoked the memory of Annie, who had also walked them years before. Or cover the cause of this murdered man, Marc Richer, to then understand that it is his cousin.
“Damaged, rejected”
Did the writing exercise calm her down? “I can’t wait to see how much. But I actually feel lighter. »
By reading her manuscript, she hopes that the reader will be “more compassionate” and perhaps also understand the compassion she herself feels, says the writer who has received insults for speaking in her podcast about the terrible past of the “monster” Mario Bastien, who killed the young Alexandre Livernoche.
Feeling pity for those who have committed unspeakable crimes, dwelling on their journey, does not destroy the horror of the crime committed nor the pain of the victims. “One does not exclude the other,” she says. His years spent in courthouses brought him this certainty, which comes with experience: “the accused are for the most part damaged, rejected, abandoned”.
Those who open the book to find a parade of sordid details might be disappointed. Above all, there is a lot of humanity.