This mother of two children was murdered on May 27, 2019 after, according to the investigation, months of threats and harassment. Her former companion, who admitted to having killed her, appears from Monday before the Northern Assizes, alongside three men accused of complicity.
“Everything was predictable.” This is what Nicolas, the brother of Nathalie Debaillie, had her throat slit on May 27, 2019 near Lille. His former companion, Jérôme Tonneau, and three other accused will appear before the Northern Assizes, in Douai, from Monday June 24 to Friday July 5. All face life imprisonment. “Jérôme Tonneau admitted the facts and the premeditation”, specifies his lawyer Stéphane Daquo to franceinfo. This assassination came to complete “the cycle of a foretold death”, observes Nicolas Debaillie. Because Jérôme Tonneau never hid his intentions, assuring anyone who would listen that he wanted to kill his ex-partner.
“Everyone could have done something, but everyone preferred to remain silent”, regrets Isabelle Steyer, the lawyer who represents the family of Nathalie Debaillie. The forty-year-old, mother of two children, had gone to the Lille police station four times during the months preceding her death, equipped with multiple elements to demonstrate the harassment and threats she was experiencing, filing three arrests and a complaint. Without his executioner being heard once by the police, despite his violent past.
Nathalie Debaillie was 45 years old when she met Jérôme Tonneau, 52 years old, on a dating site in October 2016. “She was a resplendent woman, who easily created a bond with people”, slips his brother, showing photos of this brunette with a big smile. She was then a senior executive in a bank. Her new companion, the owner of a dry cleaner, showers her with gifts and takes her to Marrakech, all expenses paid.
It quickly becomes invasive and takes little by little its freedoms on its interior. First his bed, which he has replaced without warning her for a more high-end model. Then, he also changes his frames on the wall, his dishes… Always under the pretext of wanting the best for his new partner. “She told me that she couldn’t take it anymore, that he was taking up more and more space in her life. He absolutely wanted to move in with her, but she didn’t want to”has explained the victim’s sister to investigators.
He will go so far as to require him, in April 2018, to build an extension at his house which he finances himself, by recruiting undeclared workers. At the same time, Nathalie Debaillie learned that her partner had spent a year in prison for fraud. “He bullshits her, tells her that it’s in the past, that he earns his living honestly from now on,” remembers Nicolas Debaillie. But, far from putting an end to his illicit activities, Jérôme Tonneau does it again.
In July 2018, the police arrived at Nathalie Debaillie’s house and searched her apartment: her boyfriend was suspected of having simulated the theft of her SUV to receive compensation from his insurance (he would be sentenced in 2020 for these acts). This is too much. After a first breakup in January, she decided to leave him a second time. To clear her mind, she goes to her brother’s house in Dordogne for a few weeks in August. But when she returns, it’s a cold shower: she finds that Jérôme Tonneau has gone to her home without her consent, filled her fridge and had a booklet printed full of photos of her and fiery declarations. “I’m not at the end of my troubles…”she wrote to her brother.
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Faced with the insistence of her ex, Nathalie Debaillie breaks down and gets back together with him. But this time, she decides to seek help from a psychologist and moves forward, step by step, to try to regain her freedom. On February 2, 2019, she left him for good. This time, she forces him to give her back his keys, something she had never demanded before. Jérôme Tonneau then shows a much darker face: “I don’t need your keys, I’ll go through your garden to see you”he immediately tells her, according to the victim’s brother.
Very quickly, the threats begin. “I’m going to put pressure on him,” “She’s not going to make it”he says to anyone who will listen, according to information collected by investigators, to which franceinfo had access. “He had a feeling of omnipotence, of total impunity”, analyzes Nicolas Debaillie. The couple’s friends warn her. “Be careful, lock your door,” they advise him. But no one goes to the police.
On February 11, 2019, Nathalie Debaillie went to the Lille police station for the first time to report the threats. The facts reported give rise to a ruling. The object? “Dispute between cohabitees”. Since August 2021, the procedure has evolved: the Ministry of the Interior asks police officers and gendarmes to “definitely proscribe” the handrails in cases of domestic violence for the benefit of complaints, so that the prosecutor is aware of them.
The forty-year-old returned on March 5, terrified. Jérôme Tonneau followed her into the underground parking lot of her workplace. She just had time to push him away when the elevator doors closed. He also sometimes spends his days in the bistro located at the foot of his office, as evidenced by the multiple photos taken by Nathalie Debaillie. The police again offer him a handrail. Object : “Unwanted disruptor”.
Determined, she returned four days later, on March 9, and filed a complaint for repeated death threats. “He says he wants to kill me, get a weapon. Jérôme Tonneau scares me: sometimes nice, sometimes angry”, is it written in this complaint which will never be transmitted to the prosecution. He is supposed to come and collect things from her house three days later, on March 12. She requests that the police patrol her neighborhood at that time. Response from the Lille police station: “No protective measures need to be implemented.” And, a little further: “Significance of the harm suffered by the victim: none.”
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The profile of Jérôme Tonneau does not make the police react either. However, the investigation report relates, three of his former companions had already suffered harassment and violence. One of them even filed a complaint after he tried to strangle her. “All the lights were red”points out Nicolas Debaillie.
But on May 22, it is she who must be held accountable. Nathalie Debaillie is in fact summoned to the same police station for a cell phone theft, of which Jérôme Tonneau accuses her. She shows up with a note, in which he specifies that he gave her the phone as a gift. She took advantage of this summons to file a third complaint, in which she claimed that one of her tires had been deflated, that she had received photos of tombstones, that spyware had been installed on her phone and that someone regularly tries to hack their Facebook account. She also ensures that Jérôme Tonneau continues to follow her constantly. His former companion will never be summoned.
Five days later, on May 27, Nathalie Debaillie was kidnapped at 8:50 a.m. in the parking lot of her workplace by the man who had been making her go through hell for months, helped by three young men aged 23 to 29, whom he had paid around 300 euros each, according to the report of their interrogations. A “paltry sum”, underlines Isabelle Steyer. “They didn’t do it for money but just to kill a woman, because a woman is worthless. This is real feminicide“, estimates the lawyer.
Stéphane Daquo, one of Jérôme Tonneau’s lawyers, does not have the same reading. “If feminicide is killing a woman, then it is. But for me, femicide is a murder committed by a violent man, who had been raping his wife for a long time, and who ends up killing her “, he says. Which does not correspond, according to him, to the profile of his client. “We are faced with a man who was full of antidepressants and medications, at the height of despair, who loses his temper at a given moment and commits the irreparable”he maintains.
The police were alerted by a witness at the scene within ten minutes. The victim and suspect are identified very quickly. However, the police took two hours to show up at Jérôme Tonneau’s home, in the Lille suburbs. They just knock on the door and turn back, seeing that they get no answer. It was only four hours later that a second crew forced the door, discovering, in the bathtub, the lifeless body of Nathalie, her throat cut with a cutter. His remains are strewn with multiple wounds.
According to TF1, an administrative investigation by the IGPN, the police force, “concluded that the Lille police officers had acted professionally and quickly”adding all the same “that a more experienced service should have been contacted from the start of the kidnapping”. When contacted, the communications department of the national police did not wish to communicate on this procedure.
The family of Nathalie Debaillie filed a complaint in April 2021, for breach of police ethics. “There were sanctions. Sanctions for the police officer who took the complaint and for the commander at the time. So there were consequences and at the same time a total reorganization of the brigade with regard to the violence family and marriage in Lille”said the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, during a trip in February 2022 to the north of France.
The Central Directorate of Public Security (DDSP) of the North, for its part, informed the family that it had “made transfers, and gave a warning and a reprimand”, grateful “the existence of an ethical and professional breach”. Answer “insufficient” for Nicolas Debaillie. Alongside the victim’s son and her ex-husband, they decided to attack the State for having “allowed the feasibility of the crime”, they reported to the magazine She.
The complaint was filed in December by their lawyer, Isabelle Steyer, who claims 600,000 euros for the damage suffered by the relatives of the missing person. The State has only been convicted twice for “gross negligence” in cases of femicide. A first in 2020, after the murder of Isabelle Thomas and her parents in 2014, in Grande-Synthe (North), the court having ruled that the police had put the killer “in a position to commit the three assassinations”. And a second time in 2022, after a young woman was doused with acid in Marseille by her former partner in 2018, even though she had filed seven complaints against him.
Women victims of violence can contact 3919, a free and anonymous telephone number. This listening, information and guidance platform is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This number guarantees the anonymity of people, but is not an emergency number like 17 which allows for his part, in the event of immediate danger, to telephone the police or gendarmerie.