On December 25, 1995, the sun was barely rising when a phone call interrupted a very calm shift at the Busset gendarmerie, in Allier. At a time when the children are busy unwrapping their presents, two hunters have just discovered a body lying below departmental road 121, in the heart of the thick Vernet forest. No, it can’t be an accident, or even a suicide, they assure the soldiers on the line. They are certain of it. The corpse, a hunter if his clothing is anything to go by, was decapitated.
As soon as they arrived on site, the police realized that this ditch was not the crime scene. The body has been completely drained of blood, but the ground is not stained with it. Above all, despite intense searches, the victim’s head was not found. She never will be. The man was, however, quickly identified thanks to his identity papers found in his jacket. Christophe Doire, a 28-year-old father, whose wife Maria reported his disappearance on Monday, December 18. In fact, it had already been two days since anyone had seen him. On Saturday evening, the 16th, he went to watch a football match at his brother, Olivier’s house. He left around 11 p.m. The next day, he was supposed to go hunting but failed his partners. But the young woman explains that her husband sometimes disappears for a day or two, which is why she waited before making a report.
The hunter’s trail
The investigators quickly favored the trail of a settling of scores between hunters. Christophe Doire is, by all accounts, an outstanding hunter. This employee of the Vichy slaughterhouses spends all his free time there, even if it means neglecting his wife and their son, Anthony, aged 9 in 1995. Even if it means venturing into reserved areas or not respecting quotas, this who has the gift of annoying local hunters to the highest degree. His widow reports that on the day of his disappearance, his favorite hunting dog, Flora, disappeared, probably stolen from their home. A man, Dominique M., is quickly suspected. To be the author of the dog theft, first of all. And murder, above all. The man was taken into custody twice but was always released without charge.
The possibility of a marital conflict is also considered. It is common knowledge that the couple is struggling. Two years earlier, Maria wanted a divorce, tired of her husband’s alcoholism. Especially since when the latter drinks, he is violent. He promised to stop. It did not happen. And the violence continued. The young woman’s colleagues remember once seeing the couple arguing in the car: Maria received a punch so violent that the passenger window shattered under the violence of the shock. This avenue, however, was quickly ruled out. “There is a gender bias,” believes Juliette Chapelle, Olivier Doire’s lawyer. In 1995, for investigators, it was unimaginable that a woman – a mother at that – could be involved in such a violent murder, a beheading. » The judicial investigation resulted in a dismissal of the case in 2000. A second was reopened in 2002 and closed five years later, like the first.
New scientific investigations
The folder remained sleeping in the basement of the Cusset court for almost fifteen years. Until in 2020, thanks to confinement, the public prosecutor, Eric Neveu, dove into it again. With the gendarmes of the Central Criminal Intelligence Service, they identify inconsistencies and above all unexploited leads, or too little. “We decided to start from scratch, to act as if we had just discovered the crime scene,” describes the magistrate. DNA analyzes on the seals are ordered. In April 2022, the investigating judges brought together the victim’s relatives to inform them that the body was going to be exhumed. The atmosphere is tense, the news does not delight Maria and Anthony who have started a new life far from the region, far from their old life and this affair. “They criticized Olivier Doire, Christophe’s brother, for his activism in the matter and for stirring up old memories,” recalls Me Juliette Chapelle.
A few weeks later, in June 2022, the widow was summoned again. With the police this time. For police custody. She is interviewed six times in twenty-four hours and constantly denies it. She makes no secret of the more than degraded relationship with the victim – “unofficially, we were not a couple” – but she minimizes the violence. Where the testimonies are damning, she only recognizes “slaps”. “There were times when it got out of hand (…) I wasn’t going through hell but it happened, when it blew up, it blew up,” she says. The episode of the blown window? “Absolutely false,” she swears. Investigators are looking for a motive. Has Christophe Doire already attacked Anthony, their son, with whom she describes a close relationship? She swears not “on the head of [ses] children “. In 2002, however, she assured that she intervened when this happened. A transcription problem, she argues.
Speaking DNA analyzes
The analyzes made it possible to bring out new elements. Maria’s DNA was found on one of the victim’s boots, in the middle of a mixture of blood and Christophe Doire’s skin cells. “These boots were at their house, of course she could have touched them,” says one of her lawyers, Me Jean-François Canis. And what do we think of this anecdote told to Olivier during the football evening? Christophe then told him that his partner dropped a hairdryer in the shower tray while he was washing. Questioned by the investigating judge, Maria pleads an accident. “He took a chestnut, it blew his mind,” she says. Her lawyer specifies that she told this story herself, from the start of the investigation. “If it was something she considered incriminating, why would she have told it? »
Scientific investigations have above all made it possible to demonstrate that the clothes found on Christophe Doire are not those he was wearing when he was killed. One detail, first of all, intrigued them: he who systematically wears jogging pants under his hunting pants did not have any. And when he was killed, he had his street socks on instead of his hunting ones. Analysis of the outfit he wore during the football evening – when he was last seen – will confirm that he was changed post-mortem: these clothes were soaked in blood. Certainly, on the seals, this does not appear to the naked eye, but the analysis of the fibers is clear.
This street outfit was seized by the gendarmes at Maria’s house four days after the discovery of the body. They had just been washed and were drying on the clothesline. “When I washed the clothes, there was no blood,” Maria assures the investigating judge. She points out that many people have stopped by their house, implying that the laundry may have been left by the killer. The investigators, however, pointed out to her that that month of December 1995, she had an abnormally high water bill. She also rented a shampoo machine a few days after the disappearance.
An accomplice?
At the end of her police custody, Maria was indicted on June 30, 2022. “There is no serious clue,” deplores Me Jean-François Canis. And to insist: “As for the motive, we invented one: she would have done this to protect her son from the violence of his father. But no one has ever witnessed this. » Investigations continue, in particular to identify a possible accomplice. On the boot, male DNA was identified, mixed with that of Maria. Last October, the body of a man, presented as a potential lover of Maria (which she always denied), was exhumed. According to our information, the DNA analyzes do not match.
Could the accused have killed, beheaded and moved the body alone? On this point, the different sources of the file are divided. The pathologist considered that the decapitation could have been carried out using “a butchery or hunting tool”. Maria certainly held a CAP in Charcuterie, but could she have acted alone? As for the body, Christophe Doire was small and lean, weighing around sixty kilos. Headless and drained of blood, the victim probably wasn’t very difficult to move. But Maria is also thin. So many gray areas that will have to be cleared up before a possible trial is held, almost 30 years after the murder.