The week promises to be painful at the foundations of the Gironde in the file of the feminicide of Artigues-près-Bordeaux
in 2018. After a first day, Friday, devoted to the personality of the accused, Thierry Roché, the court will spend the next few days questioning experts and witnesses. This Monday in particular, the accused’s ex-wife is expected to take the stand**. The mother of her three children, remained twenty years in a relationship with the one she describes as manipulative, angry and violent. He had threatened her with death when they separated.
She had also filed a complaint, too. Which makes the victim’s sister, Isabelle Salmon, say that, given everything the police and the justice system knew, this crime could have been avoided: “She had text messages “I’m going to kill you” all that, she had gone to see the police in tears. It already takes guts. They told her “we will do what is necessary” that’s all. him or the others, the men who kill their wives are just cowards!”
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I didn’t go to kill her
Friday, after recalling the facts Thierry Roché admitted to having killed his ex-partner Sylvie Salmon with six bullets but not having premeditated it: “I didn’t go to kill her” he told the court. A psychologist and a psychiatrist then succeeded each other at the helm to paint a portrait of this fifty-year-old in prison since the facts. We have learned that Thierry Roché lived until the age of 20 while wetting the bed, a pathology that goes hand in hand with abusive and humiliating upbringing.
Then come romantic relationships and there, the scenarios are alike with each breakup: threats, violence, suicide blackmail, “the instinctual tap that opens with passages to the act” explains the expert psychologist at the helm. He specifies that the accused has a strong separation anxiety at the heart of the problem, “he systematically oscillates between love and hate a few minutes apart”. The expert continues: “He said this sentence to me when speaking of Sylvie Salmon “for me I was no longer a person without her””
Love is giving, not refusing to lose.
“So what should have been done” asks the president. “If it hadn’t been for the alcohol already, it could have helpedanswers the expert if there hadn’t been the weapon too, we know that makes it easier to take action, but even without the 357 magnum he would have committed an act, it just wouldn’t have happened the same way. Here in relation to other relations ends the psychologist, the hatred was more intense, on a level with the love which was more intense. And his psychiatrist colleague to temper: “A crime of passion is not a crime of love, it is a crime of selfishness. Love is giving, it is not refusing to lose.”
If premeditation is retained, he risks the life imprisonment.