In 2000, Émile Louis confessed to the murder of seven young disabled girls who disappeared in the 1970s in Yonne, but retracted a month later. Four years later, he was sentenced by the Yonne Assize Court to life imprisonment for “the case of the disappeared from Yonne”. A terrible serial killer who founded, alongside his atrocities, a family. Maryline Vinet is one of them, it is his eldest daughter, born of his marriage to Chantal Delagneau. Fifteen years after the release of his book To be the daughter of Emile Louisshe had confided in the microphone of Christophe Hondelatte in 2021, on Europe 1. Back to her interview with an open heart, without taboo.
The journalist specializing in criminal affairs Christophe Hondelatte asks his guest if it is possible to turn the page when you are the daughter of Emile Louis, who died in 2013. Without detour, she answers: “I don’t think I could shoot it one day. Of course there are times when I don’t think about it. (…) But it will always be present. I’m not necessarily thinking of Emile but of all the atrocities he may have committed. Not a day goes by without me being brought back, in one way or another, to this atmosphere, to this family. It weighs very heavy. Of course, now I have another life, I have children, grandchildren, and I’m fine like that. But still, there’s always something.”
Faced with the horror, Maryline Vinet could have been tempted to be in denial or to find excuses for him. But no, what she wants is to try to understand how a human being can come to this. To become this “bastard”. Her goal as a woman, mother and grandmother: to get out of the infernal spiral that marked her family. She believes she has succeeded:My children have absolutely no contact with the family. My husband and I make it a point of honor that our children have a healthy life, far from all this tumult.“
Like any parent, she had questions when she became a mother, but her references were complicated. However, she paints a nuanced portrait of her mother: “Mom was very different from what she was afterwards. We shared some very good times. I was the eldest.” Involved in looking after her brothers and sisters, feeling invested with a mission, she keeps some good memories. And then there are the wounds that cannot be erased, such as the rape she suffered at the age of 5 years by his father and of which his mother would have been aware: “I think she had doubts because we had an old neighbor who had taken a liking to my mother. The last night after coming home from the clinic after what he did to me, she never left me alone with him again until mom came home..”
A mother who did everything to preserve family integrity, ignoring her husband’s actions to avoid the “what will be said”: “She wanted to preserve her sons, more than her daughters. She knew what he was capable of. She did not want her sons to reproduce the paternal pattern.“A silence that ended when Maryline Vinet took up her pen to tell her story.