Émile Louis was sentenced in November 2004 by the Yonne Assize Court to life imprisonment for “the case of the disappeared from Yonne”, the murders of young disabled women he committed at the late 1970s. A terrible character who had his own family. How to live with the weight of being related by blood to such an individual? His eldest, Maryline Vinet, tried to understand in a catharsis book published in 2003, Being the daughter of Émile Louis. Christophe Hondelatte interviewed her for his program on Europe 1 devoted to major French criminal cases. Before listening to it, the journalist read chilling passages from this book recounting what she saw of the atrocities, but also what she suffered.
Married by force at barely 17 years old, Maryline, the first of the four children that Emile Louis will have with Chantal Delagneau, remains under the influence of her terrible father. She remembers one day when her father decides to take her shopping but stops at a bistro just before. When she comes back from the bathroom and drinks her glass of mint, she quickly feels bad, like drugged. He brings her back to the car and if her memories are fuzzy, she manages to transcribe the horror of the scene: “I am without will, a spectator of myself. It’s confusing but I remember him leading me towards a field. I remember him pushing me into a cabin. How long had passed before I found myself naked on the ground? He rapes me, first with objects and then he leaves me naked.“
The ordeal does not end there. Emile Louis abandons his daughter all night, leaving her tied up, then picks her up and drops her off, alone, at the gendarmerie. She doesn’t say anything to the officers for fear of being called “slut“. One of them takes her home and she is greeted by her father who insults her by accusing her of having cheated on her husband. He takes her mother to task, who answers with her hands: “And there, mom starts hitting me and my brother with it. Why would I speak? She wouldn’t believe me.“
Maryline Vinet said nothing about what she experienced or saw because Emile Louis threatened each time to kill her mother if she spoke, and this, since her earliest childhood, she who was raped from the age of 5 years. When she stayed in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt, he came to see her every day to repeat this pitiless sentence that will haunt her life: “If you talk, I’ll kill her.“