On the fifth day of the trial of Jean-Marc Reiser, prosecuted for the “assassination” of Sophie le Tan in 2018, a psychologist painted the portrait of a man with a “double” personality, endowed with “very good social skills”, but with “psychopathic, perverse and narcissistic” disorders.
At the helm, Peggy Allimann appears sure of herself, speaks without hesitation. She introduces herself as a “psychocriminologist”, who became a judicial police officer in 2020, a qualification which she did not have in 2018, when she attended the hearings of the suspect in police custody. She describes a man who “shows very good self-control and seeks to control his environment”, capable of using “several manipulative procedures”.
“Approach by trickery”
To the jurors who will have to decide on the guilt of Jean-Marc Reiser at the end of two weeks of debates and thus close a file which required three years of investigation, it offers an attractive reading of the events in its simplicity, but without doubt too smooth to account for all the complexity of the facts.
According to her, the accused attempted “a trickery approach” to his victim, by publishing on the internet “a false advertisement for rental accommodation”. If he set his sights on a stranger, it was to “reduce the risk of being linked to the crime”. And the choice of the appointment at his home allowed “to reduce the risk of being seen and to have more time to commit his crimes”, supports the clinician.
His analysis grid allows him “to link him to the category of sexual murderers of the sadistic type”, affirms Peggy Allimann at the culmination of his demonstration. “These are people who generally anticipate, commit acts with the idea of leaving as few traces as possible”.
defense reviews
The defense lawyers, who had little taste for this presentation, quickly tried to show its limits. “What is embarrassing”, advances Me Emmanuel Spano, “is that you start from a postulate on the ruse which is that of the investigators, which you take at face value”, he criticizes.
“Absolutely”, replies the psychologist, “at no time would I have allowed myself to question their work”. But at the time of his work, “the investigation only began two days ago”, underlines the lawyer, deploring an analysis “of a dishonest subjectivity”. “What if the investigators are wrong? he asks.
The President of the Court, Christine Schlumberger, regains control of the debates and questions “the state of prostration” that Jean-Marc Reiser says he experienced “for two hours” after he had dealt the fatal blows to Sophie Le Tan. “We find this state in the perpetrators of an impulsive act, when the primary intention was not to kill”, specifies the psychologist.
Cause of death unknown
A little earlier, the court had heard the forensic doctors who looked into the body of Sophie Le Tan, discovered – incomplete – more than a year after her disappearance, on the edge of the forest.
The decomposition of the corpse prevented the determination of the exact causes of death. The version of the accused – the victim would have died of a shock during a fall following blows – leaves professionals skeptical.
“It’s very unlikely, but we can’t completely rule it out,” admits Dr. Laurent Berthelon. “In the vast majority of cases, one would have expected to observe a period of coma likely to lead to death. The skeleton of the young woman, however, presented a small lesion – non-fatal – on the top of the rib cage caused by a knife.
“Can we imagine that a person armed with a knife presses it on the victim, so that she does not shout or obtain something from her”, questions the president, suggesting a sexual assault under duress. “Your question contains an intentional element, it is not up to medicine to answer it,” replied Doctor Laurent Berthelon.
Questioned in turn, Jean-Marc Reiser denies having used a blade, except when he took the body parts out of the plastic bags in which he had taken him, to bury them.