It is still dark, this October 16, 2002, when Blandine is walking on a country lane. Three kilometers separate her from the college of Aulnoye-Aymeries (North), where she is educated in third class. In a few weeks, she will be 14 years old. “I was in the middle of a teenage crisis. That morning, I decided to leave on foot, to avoid meeting a friend on the bus.”
Blandine sees a blue car and hears the sound of a door opening. Then footsteps. “Someone ran up behind me and threw me at the nettles. He tried to undress me, but couldn’t. I had on tight pants. He masturbated on top of me”relates Blandine to franceinfo, twenty years later. “I let him, I played dead.” A car passes and scares the aggressor away. “All I saw of him was a black sweater with a white line.”
Her face, Blandine discovers it at the end of February 2018: round cheeks, dark eyes, thick eyebrows and a receding hairline. “I opened Facebook and I read an article about the arrest of the ‘rapist of the Sambre’. It was obvious: all the details on his way of proceeding revealed to me that it was him”, assures the thirty-something. Like everyone else, she discovers that the man arrested is called Dino Scala. That he was born in 1961, that he is married and has a family. That it is well integrated into its commune of Pont-sur-Sambre (North). To the point that no one suspected anything.
From its police custody, Dino Scala admits having attacked around forty women. But he denies certain facts, such as the attempted rape of Blandine. However, certain elements related to its modus operandi enabled the investigating judge to keep this case in the file. Thus, at the end of the procedure, he was finally dismissed for rape and sexual assault, or attempts, sometimes with a weapon and on a minor, committed between 1988 and 2018 on 56 women, including Blandine.
His trial takes place before the Assize Court of the North, in Douai, from Friday June 10 to Friday July 1. He faces up to twenty years in prison. “The causes of his actions will be at the heart of the debates. He wants to explain them as well as possible and is aware of the seriousness of the facts”assures franceinfo Margaux Mathieu, Dino Scala’s lawyer.
Everyone who knows him wants to unravel the mystery. “I would like to understand why he did that”declares for example Claude Dupont, mayor The Republicans of Boussières-sur-Sambre since 1995. “The day we found out he was the rapist, I was furious, shocked and amazedsays the 69-year-old city councilor. I knew him as a very discreet man, who was of service to everyone.”
Dino Scala is very active. He is divided between football, his family, his job and moonlighting to make ends meet. Holder of an electromechanical CAP, this maintenance technician has worked for many years at Jeumont Electric, where motors are manufactured for industrial sectors.. To get there, he just has to follow the bed of the Sambre. Dino Scala does not make waves at the factory. “He was working with one of my kids, who introduced him to me. I saw him three times. I would never have believed that boy, I was seized”explains a local mechanic. “It was appreciated. He chatted easily, always in a good mood. He hid his game really well… as if he had two personalities”adds an employee who worked with him from 2008.
“It was ‘Monsieur Tout Le Monde’, above suspicion.”
A Jeumont Electric employeeat franceinfo
The smooth image of the model colleague is shattered just before his working days. Most of the time, Dino Scala indulges in an unleashing of violence in the fall or winter, at the beginning of dawn. He chooses places out of sight. Questioned by the investigators on each rape or sexual assault committed, he himself explains his well-established modus operandi: “I grabbed her by the neck”, “I gave her an armbar”, “I grabbed her from behind, I put her on the ground”. To strangle the victim, he uses a scarf or a rope that he always keeps in his car. Often, he orders her to be quiet and threatens her with a knife. He blindfolds her, then rapes her. He sometimes asks him to count to 30, the time for him to flee.
The “rapist of the Sambre” is sometimes forgotten for a year, or even two. Then it rages again, a few weeks apart. In the eyes of Dino Scala, these women assaulted and raped “remain abstract shadows”, according to the psychologists who have appraised it. But for them, the trauma is deep and has left a scar for life. Some will not have the strength to come and testify at trial. All dread facing him, even if they are waiting for a conviction to turn the page.
Despite the DNA collected at several crime scenes, the investigation stalled for a long time. Until we identified his license plate on CCTV footage from the Belgian town of Erquelinnes, after the assault on a woman who managed to flee. This allowed the investigators to finally get their hands on the one who was nicknamed “the rapist of the Sambre”. Without that, no one would ever have suspected this man with a clean criminal record and an ordinary life.
“In the region, everyone knew a victim, but no one made the connection”explains to franceinfo Séverine Billard, lawyer for three plaintiffs. “These cases were covered up or remained in the family circle. And it all depended on who we fell on when we went to file a complaint.” “At the time, in the common idea, the complainant always had a share of responsibility”abounds his colleague Emmanuel Riglaire, who represents two other women. “Dino Scala has, like all of us, his dark side. But what is incredible is that he has not been visible for so many years”he observes.
“It is very exceptional that he was not arrested before”, insists to franceinfo the psychiatrist Daniel Zagury. The court expert believes that this “proves” that he mastered “his modus operandi” and “demonstrates a certain skill in not being apprehended”. “It’s extremely striking to see how this type of subject can function, around this mechanism called splittingobserves Daniel Zagury. A part of them is completely adapted. But at the same time, they have staggering behaviors, in rupture and in apparent contradiction. In his book The barbarity of ordinary men (ed. L’Observatoire, 2018), the psychiatrist designates them as “Mr. All Monster”as opposed to “Mister everyone” relatives describe “when they learn of the monstrous acts committed”.
“When he rapes for the first time, something like this happens that he repeats it and systematizes it, with a feeling of impunity. This is what is obvious about this serial rapist”, also analyzes Daniel Zagury. “By committing his first crime, the predator activates a traumatic memory in his brain. When he is invaded again by the images of this first rape, he will want to replay the scene. He takes action to relieve himself” , already explained to franceinfo Muriel Salmona, psychiatrist and president of the association Traumatic memory and victimology, at the time of the arrest of Dino Scala in 2018.
“On the one hand, there is violence, with assaults, over a long period. The other, a beloved man, endearing: he is a good father, a sincere friend, a loving husband. He there is a divide between two opposite facets”, concedes his lawyer. At the time of his arrest, his wife, whom he met in 1988, depicted him as “helpful, open, attentive”. Their three children describe parents “normal and complementary”, although, according to the youngest of the siblings, the couple is not happy and his mother is depressed.
But his first wife, with whom he was married for seven years and had two children, did not have the same experience. She paints the portrait of an unfaithful and violent man with a dual personality. And accuses him of sexual abuse of one of his sisters. Allegations that have become a family secret, but which resurfaced during the hearings of each other. As for her first daughter, she accuses her of touching and, with her brother, calls her “the other”.
Dino Scala severed ties with this first family nearly thirty years ago. He has few with his three brothers and two sisters. Of Italian origin, he was treated as macaroni spaghetti in his childhood and these mockeries marked him. Facing the investigating judge, in August 2019, he explained “to have always felt apart and not recognized at its true value”. He says he constantly experiences “a kind of injustice”which obliges him “to remain the eternal second in the eyes of his father, his wife, his employer, or even the football clubs where he trained”. According to him, it is this feeling that guides his actions, in order to “to find the light where everyone left it in the shadows”.
Could his violent behavior be revenge on others? The psychiatrists and psychologists who have analyzed it differ on this point. For the former, it would be “give in to ease”. They point “dangerous state” by Dino Scala. The second describe a man “obsessive”, “a predator-hunter who acts in the shadows”. They fall under “high psychopathic tendencies” his home. And an “indifference” to what one of her sisters experienced, who says she was touched by their father between the ages of 4 and 13. Because the investigation brought to light this other family secret. “It can be a cofactor. But it’s not because his father is incestuous that he became a rapist. There are many elements that combine”warns psychiatrist Daniel Zagury.
“We try to understand his environment, the incestuous climate in which he grew up.”
Margaux Mathieu, lawyer for Dino Scalaat franceinfo
Blandine, she was not very surprised by the revelations about the double life of the accused. “He can’t be the only one like that. He’s a crank, that’s all”, she thinks. Today she no longer wants “to see oneself as a victim” and will invite the other women to do the same on June 24, during her testimony before the Assize Court. And facing the dock, where Dino Scala will be.