At the Loire-Atlantique Assize Court
Before the facts, he considered himself a “joker”, “sensitive” man, “a little proud and conceited” at times. Four and a half years after the quadruple murder of the Troadec family, in their Orvault pavilion near Nantes, it is not really this face that the main accused shows, at the Loire-Atlantique Assize Court, in the second day of his trial. Asked all day this Wednesday about his personality, Hubert Caouissin, 50, long-sleeved polo shirt and the front of his bald head, wiped a few tears, without ever really flinching.
“This golden story, I think we will never know,” he replied to the president of the Assize Court Karine Laborde. But my conviction is that it has always existed… ”And that this treasure, which has never been found, it is Pascal and Brigitte who stole it. “I am anchored in the past”, justifies the one who recognizes today to have “a problem of feeling on the things”.
How could this former worker at the Brest arsenal, sportsman, stock marketer, lover of logging, fuel such an obsession until this “madness”, as he calls it, of February 2017? At the helm, often drowning in anecdotes, Hubert Caouissin looks back at length on his difficult childhood in Brittany, “out of step with the others”, in a messy house where an alcoholic mother also lives. But he cries even more when we come to the year 2009, the date of the beginning of what he calls his “descent into hell”.
“A mad aggressiveness which rose”
That year, three years after his meeting with Lydia, the man saw the birth of his first child, “the most important thing in the world”, when his companion, also tried before the Assize Court, was diagnosed with cancer. . Big complications, several relapses, he is afraid of losing her. A few months later, he buries his father-in-law, this “patriarch” of whom he thinks he would have found the famous ingots during the work. It was at this time that relations with the other part of the family, his brother-in-law Pascal and his wife whom he “never managed to identify” and their children whom he “loved affectionately” become distended. Until 2014, when an altercation around the loot broke out and fractured the family.
A few months ago, things are really not going well with the Caouissins. In Plougerneau, Lydie got out of it, but Hubert faced a depression. Her son has health and behavioral problems, and work exhausts him. “I had difficulty sleeping, concentrating, increasing aggressiveness,” he says. At work, we were crowded, there is a lot of noise, stress all the time ”. He can not stand any noise, a greenhouse next to prevent him from sleeping. Just a phone ringing assaults him. “I cracked, I felt a mad aggressiveness which rose, I had impulses”, continues the man, hands behind the back, who considered inconclusive his one and only appointment with the psychiatrist at this period. .
“Fear has taken over”
This “compulsive accumulator”, who has decided to suspend his antipsychotics against medical advice to “be fit for the trial”, stops working and spends a lot of time in front of his computer. One day, he consults a survivalist site where he explains “how to make a silencer”. In the midst of various documents, more than a million pornographic images will also be found. Feeling tracked down by Brigitte and Pascal, who ask questions about their son, he decides to buy the Pont-de-Buis farm with Lydie, without informing anyone, except his mother-in-law. A quiet place but above all “a decoy” to avoid “sending them a killer”. The little one, then eight years old, is out of school. “Fear has taken over,” summarizes the accused, who had resumed a part-time position a few months before taking action.
Next Monday, Hubert Caoussin will be questioned this time on the facts of that night when he arrived in Orvault equipped with a stethoscope to listen to the family until he finished burning their bones in the large boiler of his property. . Thursday, a brief portrait of his four victims, Pascal, Brigitte, Sébastien and Charlotte, will be drawn up in front of the court before the hearing of the civil parties, in particular the sisters of the deceased mother. The main defendant faces life imprisonment, his ex partner three years in prison. The verdict will be known on July 8 or 9.