“It’s an incredible destiny, that of Gérald Thomassin: this kid from the DDASS who receives a César at 16, and then this disappearance…” Why did the actor disappear on the very day he was going to be cleared suspicions of murder that had weighed on him for ten years? Jérôme Bermyn, journalist, and Camille Radot, his last lawyer, are the guests of the magazine “Affaires sensible”.
For more than ten years, the former hope of French cinema, Caesarized at 16 for The Little Criminal by Jacques Doillon, proclaimed his innocence in a murder case. That of Catherine Burgod, postwoman in Montréal-la-Cluse, found stabbed in the back room of her agency in December 2008. “Gérald Thomassin is the ideal culprit: he is the drug addict, the alcoholic, the marginal who has just settled in the village, who is opposite the postal agency, and who ends up being accused for lack of anything better”, summarizes his last lawyer, Camille Radot. In this quiet village near the Swiss border, the former child of the DDASS stands out in the landscape, “he’s not like the others”.
“We realize that in France today, you can spend two years in prison for presumptions of guilt” : Gérald Thomassin was in fact imprisoned in pre-trial detention from 2013 to 2015, on the basis of a “fairly empty folder”, underlines journalist Jérôme Bermyn, who met him as part of a report. The prosecution went so far as to imagine that having repeatedly played criminal roles on screen, he would have transferred these scenes to real life… “It’s extremely serious,” comments his lawyer.
“He tells me he’s coming, and then… no Gérald Thomassin”
In 2017, the investigation experienced a decisive turning point: the DNA traces taken from the crime scene finally spoke. They name a new suspect, Mamadou Diallo, who also lived in Montréal-la-Cluse at the time of the murder. This twist should allow Gérald Thomassin to be cleared. On August 29, 2019, he is expected at the Lyon court to “the final confrontation before the closure of the judicial investigation, at the request of Mr. Diallo’s lawyer”. The act should, with a “almost certainty”, result in a dismissal of the case for Gérald Thomassin and sign the end of his nightmare. “He wants to come, he tells me he is coming, explains Me Camille Radot. And then, no Gérald Thomassin (…). He never came, and I never heard from him again.”
What happened to him in Nantes, where Gérald Thomassin was last located? Neither the journalist nor the lawyer believe in the hypothesis of voluntary disappearance, even more so once the dismissal of the case is pronounced, in 2020. Today, Me Camille Radot fears “a tragic outcome, there is no other credible hypothesis.”
An interview carried out on the occasion of the broadcast of a documentary dedicated to “Gérald Thomassin: the strange disappearance of an ideal culprit” In “Sensitive Affairs”, a France Télévisions, France Inter and INA co-production, adapted from a France Inter program, to be seen on France 2 on Sundays at 3:05 p.m.
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