On January 1, 1996, it was barely 7 a.m. when Carole Rognon heard the drumming on the door of her apartment. She didn’t stay up until the end of the night for New Year’s Eve, but still, 7 o’clock is too early. She closes her eyes, dives back under her duvet. We knock a second time. She does not move anymore, curses the young people of her district of Lure, in Haute-Saône, whom she imagines staggering in front of her home. “Open up, damn it! His father’s voice. The young woman rushes to the door, does not even see the gendarmes and the mayor standing behind him. “Go get dressed,” he orders in a firm voice. She hesitates, doesn’t understand what’s going on, stands there, haggard. His father eventually approaches, puts his hands on his shoulders. “Jacky screwed up,” he blurts out.
Jacky is her ex-husband. After fifteen years of marriage, Carole set sail in June 1995 with her two children, Christophe, 12, and Hélène, one year her junior. All three left on the sly while the upholsterer-painter was at work. “I was afraid of him. The last few years I was almost sequestered: I was not allowed to have a checkbook, he removed the battery from the car so that I wouldn’t take it, I was forbidden to touch the mail. He did not hit me but was psychologically violent, ”she recalls. Carole was 36 years old, she is 63 today. Her hair has turned white, time has marked her face, but her gaze remains sharp, her memories precise.
She had already tried to leave her husband two years before, but he had sworn to her to make an effort, mixing beautiful promises and threats. “If you leave, I can do like Romand,” he slips into the conversation. A few months earlier, Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife, children and parents to protect the lies that have marked his life. “I take his threat seriously but I tell myself that he is targeting me, not the children,” she insists.
Thirty years in prison for this double infanticide
However, this January 1, it is indeed Christophe and Hélène in question. Jacky – “the other”, as she now calls him – took a rifle and shot them in the middle of the night, while they were sleeping at his home in Ornex, Ain. There little girl died instantly, her brother, shot in the head, died the next day in hospital. After the crime, their father attempted suicide, turning the gun on himself. But no vital part is affected. He has his jaw destroyed, one eye gouged out, but he is very much alive. First indicted for “murder”, which therefore presupposes premeditation, he was finally sentenced to thirty years of criminal imprisonment for murder, the court retaining an alteration in his discernment linked to his paranoia.
Were Christophe and Hélène victims of “feminicide by proxy”, a murder committed on children to attack their mother? In France, since 2015, the Ministry of the Interior lists these infanticides committed “in the context of domestic violence without the other parent being killed”, in its annual report on violent deaths within the couple. In 2021, twelve children from ten different families were killed in this way. In 2020, there were six. In 2019, 22. Discrepancies which illustrate the difficulty of counting these crimes – each time it is necessary to establish a direct link with the context – and therefore to understand this phenomenon.
Jacky, for example, never really explained his gesture. At the trial, he spoke of the depression he was going through and his fear of a form of downgrading for his children since they lived in low-income housing. Explanations that never convinced Carole. “For me, it’s obvious, he killed them to make me suffer, he knew he couldn’t hurt me anymore. Until then, my fear was that he would kill me and that they would have to endure it, that I could no longer protect them. »
“His voice was normal, it betrayed nothing at all”
Despite the fear that Jacky inspires in her, Carole frankly admits that she was miles away from imagining such a scenario. When his father knocks at her house on January 1, 1996, she thinks of a car accident. Jacky called him the day before. For the first time since their separation, he welcomes the children into his home. He got them for Christmas, he was supposed to bring them back on the 31st. But that day, he worries on the phone: the roads are icy, he offers to bring them back the next day. “His voice was normal, it betrayed nothing. I was disappointed not to have my children for the New Year, but I preferred not to take any risks. “Especially since she had her daughter on the phone in the middle of their stay: she, who nevertheless had a bad relationship with her father, seems delighted. His brother is also fine, even if he complains about not being able to play Nintendo.
Carole’s voice is calm. At no time does she choke, even when she evokes the most painful memories. His eyes remain dry, nothing in his gaze betrays his emotions. “I have this quality of being able to tell as if it was not me who had experienced this. I think it’s modesty, ”she smiles, before plunging back into her story. The facts may have taken place twenty-seven years ago, she remembers every detail. The journey in absolute silence with his father to get to the scene, his son lying in this hospital room, the clumsiness of the doctors who talk to him about Jacky’s health. And his cry, that evening, in the parking lot of the gendarmerie. “That’s when I started to realize what had just happened. I thought I was never going to stop screaming again. »
“I don’t know how you get up in the morning after that”
And after ? How do you move forward in life when you’ve lost everything? How do you recover from such grief? These questions, he was asked so often. Sometimes clumsily. How many times has she heard this “me, I couldn’t have been”? “It suggests that if I could, it was because I loved my children less. Bereaved parents regularly ask him for advice. Twenty-seven years later, Carole is still struggling to answer them. “I don’t know how you get up in the morning after that. In any case, there is no magic recipe. After the funeral, she remembers sitting alone in her daughter’s room, wondering if she had anything left to live for. Of course suicide crossed his mind. “I said to myself that they loved life too much, that it was necessary to continue for them. »
The months that follow, however, are akin to survival. ” I have memory lapses of the first three or four months. I have a small job in a college but otherwise, I stay cloistered at home. Girlfriends take turns, filling the fridge for me. His animals – his dog, his daughter’s and his son’s cat – help him to hold on: he has to take them out, feed them.
And then there is something else. Carole hesitates a little. “When I say it, people sometimes look at me with wide eyes, they take me for a bit of a fool. For several months, she felt the presence of her children. “From the first night, I felt like they were with me, it helped me a lot at first. I remember a white light that soothed me. “She, who has never been particularly religious, assures that several members of her entourage have confided to her that they have had visions of the children. “The last time I felt them was the day after my meeting with Jean-Pierre. They said goodbye to me, they left. »
The look of the others
It was in August 1996, eight months after the tragedy. A friend encouraged her to sign up for a dating site on the Minitel. Jean-Pierre is three years older, divorced, father of teenage girls. “It didn’t scare me, his story, it didn’t attract me either, explains this jovial mustachioed. I had a crush. Carole’s story quickly became her own. He knows her by heart, sometimes repeats his wife on the chronology or on names. He was there at the trial. He was there when she fought to recover half of the property she had in common with Jacky, or to have her children cremated.
He witnessed the uncontrollable crying spells in the early years. “I still cry sometimes, but less often. Sometimes I think of them all week, sometimes not for three days.” It is now almost only to Jean-Pierre that she talks about Christophe and Hélène. “People are uncomfortable, even when I evoke a happy memory, they don’t know how to react. »
In their new house, about thirty minutes from Besançon, you have to squint to find elements referring to its history. Two portraits no bigger than passport photos sit on the sideboard in the living room. She has had two large charcoal drawings of Christophe and Hélène made, but does not yet know where to hang them. “I don’t need that to think about it. And Jacky, does she ever think about it? After just over twenty years behind bars, he was released from prison six years ago. ” Never. I don’t even remember his face. I don’t have any hate and I don’t think I ever had. He is indifferent to me. »
“I was stigmatized”
Carole and Jean-Pierre did not have children together. He didn’t want to, she admits that it touched him but quickly changed his mind. “It wasn’t a child I missed, it was Hélène and Christophe, I didn’t want to make this drama weigh on him. The children, however, remain his daily life. Carole worked for nearly ten years as a childminder, then became a foster family in 2010. At the moment, a teenager lives with them. A vocation that has nevertheless been an obstacle course.
His story was scary. The county council even refused him approval for the first time. “I was stigmatized, they feared that I made a kind of transfer. I loved them, these kids, but I never took them for my own. When Carole is asked if she’s happy today, she doesn’t think long. “My mother’s heart is destroyed but I can say that I am still happy, especially to live with the man I love. They say you have to give time to time. It is not false. »