How to tell when you have said everything, seen everything, heard everything? And testify when the truth has never come out, probably forever? A few days before the fortieth anniversary of the death of his son Grégory, 4 years old, found in the waters of Vologne on October 16, 1984, Jean-Marie Villemin speaks in a new medium: a comic strip soberly titled Gregory. “A means of expression which can be rigorous, accessible to all”, he writes in the preface which he signs.
After having declined the first time in the past the idea of speaking in comics about the Grégory affair, one of the greatest French legal sagas, Jean-Marie Villemin has this time taken the lead. It was he who, as the drama’s 40th anniversary approached, contacted Editions des Arènes. Then with the designer Christophe Gaultier and the screenwriter Pat Perna, father in particular of Joe Bar Teamhe went back in time and plunged back into the middle of a nightmare.
Simple joy, then “annihilation”
The key, therefore, is this comic book to be published this Thursday. A work which navigates between October 1984, before and after the death of the little boy, and October 1993, during the trial of Jean-Marie Villemin for the murder of his cousin Bernard Laroche, who was once suspected.
Throughout the boxes, we of course read the distress of the Villemin couple. “Total annihilation. This is what Christine and I feel after the assassination of our little Grégory,” begins the father in his preface. “We were lost, at the bottom of the abyss, without any support,” he continues. But a window also opens onto the simple joys of young parents and their 4-year-old child.
“I will forever remain a murderer”
Of his pain, Jean-Marie Villemin has forgotten nothing. The “journalists who only think about making an audience”, the “justice gone mad”… Nor his crazy gesture of March 1985: “I broke down, I took my cousin’s life [Bernard Laroche]I will forever remain a murderer. I regret it so much. »
Now 66 years old and father of three other children with his wife Christine, Jean-Marie is “calmed” but not “hardened”, because he knows “the price of pain”. He says he “often cried” when discovering the pages of this comic strip. A contagious emotion since Patrice Perna, the designer, confided Wednesday in Release what are working on Gregory had “upended his way of doing this job”. And the story is not over, since this album is set to have a sequel.