On May 20, 2022, Frédéric Mellet, goat breeder in Joigny in Yonne in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region, was indicted for aggravated murder and placed in pre-trial detention. The reason ? His wife Chantal, with whom he works on the farm, has disappeared and has not been found for two years. If the couple’s four daughters are convinced of their father’s innocence, they face justice that has found its ideal culprit, while several elements are reminiscent of a famous ongoing case, the Jubillar affair. Le Parisien-Today in France unveiled in its edition of August 29 a long investigation and highlights the particular behavior of suspect number 1.
Difficult not to find an echo between the disappearance of Chantal Mellet and Delphine Jubillar, without a crime scene or confession, especially in the behavior of those who are singled out. Like Cédric Jubillar who did not fail to provoke the authorities and even the examining magistrates, Frédéric Mellet does not spare his language in the face of the gendarmes. When they question him insistently, he simply says: “Do you think that 22 months later I remember what I was doing or if I was in the toilet, “said the 54-year-old father crudely.”
If he is considered presumed guilty in the eyes of justice, he describes himself as the “service cuckold“of a woman who has been unfaithful to him four times and who intended to leave with her lover. During his hearing, he also said about the use of his telephone, switched off at crucial times when his wife had disappeared: “Today, you have to put the phone in your ass so as not to be bored. My answer is the same as the one I gave you from the beginning: I did not hurt my wife. We ate each other, but we had limits.“
When questioned, one of her daughters made the same kind of remarks. Her parents have already been able to insult each other, as revealed by the last daughter of the couple aged 19 during her interrogation: “Sometimes they insulted each other. My dad called my mom a bitch, my mom called him an asshole“She clarified that it could also happen to Frédéric Mellet to be brutal”to my sister and my mother“. What the interested party refutes: “I have never been violent with my wife, the deceived husband defended himself against the investigators. When she exercised violence against me, I pushed her away (…) I had four times the valid reason to divorce for adultery, but I never did. It’s called love.” Justice must continue to investigate to determine the real tenor of his relationship with his missing wife.
Frédéric Mellet remains presumed innocent of the charges against him until the final judgment of this case.