Specialist in criminal affairs, Christophe Hondelatte received on the set of Europe 1 Maryline Vinet. His name does not seem to be known, but his family record book includes a parent as famous as it is frightening: Émile Louis. She is the daughter of one of the most terrible serial killers in France, nicknamed the Boucher de l’Yonne who confessed to the murders of seven women in 2000, before recanting. The journalist begins his program devoted to this individual by reading passages from the book of the one who had to live with this man, with the simple and powerful title: To be the daughter of Emile Louis. Excerpts very difficult to listen to, especially when the author says that she witnessed one of her barbaric acts. She was then 11 years old.
For his episode on Émile Louis, Christophe Hondelatte was able to obtain the interview of the one who lived with him: his eldest daughter Maryline, born of his marriage to Chantal Delagneau. They met in their youth, he comes back from Indochina, she is good at everything as they say at the time. Both had a difficult childhood and then founded their own family. Four children are born from their union, after Maryline come Manoèle, Fabrice and Fabien. All four are in the car that Emile Louis drives one evening, when he brings them home. It was then that he took a young woman in the car and then stopped at the edge of a wood, making his offspring wait while he got out of the vehicle with the passenger.
“I see them entering the woods then I lose sight of them. In the back the two little ones start to cry then they fall asleep. And we with my brother Philippe, we wait. Time passes. I get out of the car. In the distance I see a light. Is this the girl’s house? But no, they are two large lamps. I continue to approach and there in front of me unfolds a scene from a horror movie. The girl is naked, motionless, tied with her arms crossed. And Emile is holding a knife. He sticks his knife into the girl’s body and rips her open. I must have made noise while walking. He heard me and he turns around: ‘If you say a single word of what you saw, I will do the same to your mother.’“, writes Maryline Vinet in her book To be the daughter of Émile Louis.
A chilling scene that seems impossible. Then, impossible for Maryline to remember the moments that followed, as if she had buried her memories deep down. Raped by her father from the age of 5, she grew up in a family plagued by horror. “I don’t know what would have happened if I had spoken earlier. I had sworn to be silent. It didn’t have to come out of the family“, she writes to try to understand. Émile Louis died in 2013 at the age of 78. Nine years earlier, he had been sentenced by the Yonne Assize Court to life imprisonment for “the case of the disappeared from Yonne”.