Against a backdrop of “paranoia”, “drug addiction” and “prostitution”. The Bayonne prosecutor announced this Sunday the opening of a judicial investigation for “assassination”, after the hammer murder of a 33-year-old woman in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, in the Pyrenees. Atlantics.
The victim’s companion, a 37-year-old Frenchman, will be presented during the day to an investigating judge with a view to being indicted for “assassination”. The public prosecutor announces that it is requesting his placement in pre-trial detention.
“He would have heard a monster laughing”
The body of the victim, a French national, was discovered on Friday in a hotel room, where the couple had been staying for two nights. According to prosecutor Jérôme Bourrier, describing the crime scene as a “drama of savagery”, the victim was lying naked on the bed, on his stomach, his wrists and ankles tied by a torn pillowcase. A hammer was found at the scene.
During his hearings, the accused reported a “lost of tempers”. “He would have heard a monster laughing” and would have struck with his hammer “until this monster noise stopped,” says Jérôme Bourrier.
A psychiatric assessment of the accused will be carried out, and an autopsy of the victim’s body will take place on Monday to determine a possible rape, specifies the prosecutor.
Precedents for the victim
According to Jérôme Bourrier, the couple was caught in “a fatal spiral”, “tinged with paranoia”, and lived from hotel to hotel, feeling “pursued, stalked”, sometimes by a “former client of the victim”. sometimes by the mafia.
The victim presented himself for the first time in January at the Saint-Jean-de-Luz police station with a head wound, mentioning an ax blow from an unknown person before speaking of a suicide attempt. His companion, placed in police custody, gave a “compatible” version and this first procedure was dismissed, in “the absence of sufficient charges”.
In mid-April, the victim fell from the 5th floor of a hotel in nearby Ciboure. Her vital prognosis was compromised and she had to be hospitalized. Here again, placed in police custody for “attempted homicide”, his companion was left free, particularly after his partner exonerated him “categorically”.
Finally, two days before her death, the victim had “deliberately left the hospital without notifying the staff” to join her partner and settle in this hotel in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.