It took more than three decades for the truth to come out. The journalist specializing in the police-justice section, Ronan Folgoas, was sent by Le Parisien-Today in France in La Chapelle-Souëf in Orne to find out more about what has just been declared, no longer as a disappearance, but a feminicide, that of Marlaine Marquis, then aged 22 or 23. The excavations started on June 28, 2022, now that the author has confessed to having killed his companion, mother of their two children.
Pascal, ex-lumberjack and pruner now retired, admitted, thirty-three years after the events, having put an end to the days of his ex-companion in 1989. “He would have concealed his body in a marl, one of those many cavities several meters deep that abound in the Normandy countryside.“, specifies the daily.
Originally, the absence of Marlaine, suddenly gone without her two children aged 6 months and 3 years, had been considered as a disappearance and no report had been made. The victim’s family had not been alerted since her companion had no contact with her. The thesis of the radical change of life seemed plausible. The couple’s children were “placed with a member of the paternal family and grow up without any photos and with very few memories of their deceased mother. Marlaine is even stripped of her parental rights following a request from the father of the children“.
“His daughter’s insistent questions”, the trigger
Growing up, Victoria, the former couple’s daughter, tries to understand the disappearance of her mother. She asks questions to her father who remains evasive, sometimes contradictory. Until a telephone discussion in 2019 which allows him to understand that a heavy secret is hidden behind all this. “He ended up betraying himself by answering his daughter’s insistent questions“, confided a source close to the investigation to West France. She then reports the disappearance of her mother in 2021 and the gendarmes notice that there is no longer any administrative or other trace of Marlaine for more than thirty years, there is reason to have doubts about a voluntary disappearance. “On April 27, 2022, a judicial investigation was opened for kidnapping and forcible confinement. A way to circumvent the problem of prescription of the facts in the event of homicide fixed at thirty years“, writing Le Parisien-Today in France.
A month later, Pascal is placed in police custody and ends up cracking. Marlaine had deceived him, he would then have strangled her with the telephone cable and then hidden her body on a property where he used to work. Indicted and placed under judicial supervision, he declared to West France : “I assume my actions, I am ashamed and I blame myself.” SOnly person aware of his murder: the companion with whom he rebuilt his life and who died in 2008 following a long illness.