Twenty years after the facts, the appeal in cassation of Willy Bardon against his conviction to thirty years of criminal imprisonment for the kidnapping, forcible confinement, rape and murder of Elodie Kulik in 2002, will be examined on Wednesday. If the Court of Cassation upholds the arguments of the defense, for whom the law was not correctly applied during the appeal trial, Willy Bardon, 47, will see his conviction canceled. He will not be free, but will have to be retried.
In the event of rejection, his lawyers plan to seize the European Court of Human Rights, assures one of them, Gabriel Duménil. Since his arrest in 2013, Willy Bardon has maintained his innocence. He had attempted suicide when the verdict was announced. On appeal, in July 2021 in Douai, he was sentenced to the same sentence, the court also finding him guilty of “murder”.
A “hostility to the defense” of the Court of Appeal?
On the night of January 10 to 11, 2002, Elodie Kulik, who had been kidnapped from her car after an unexplained accident in the Somme, had managed to briefly call the firefighters, leaving a chilling recording where her cries mingle with two voices of men. She had been raped, killed and burned in a field six kilometers away. The investigation had first skated ten years, until the identification of a suspect, Grégory Wiart, but the man has since died. By searching his close circle, the investigation implicates Willy Bardon, recognized by several witnesses on the sound recording.
Before the Court of Cassation, the defense raised several problems of form, in particular in the written reasons of the Court of Appeal of the North, which it considers vague. The recording only concerns the kidnapping, “we do not understand why Willy Bardon is convicted of the rape and murder”, while “no evidence” connects him to this “second scene”, explains Me Gabriel Duménil. The court “fails to explain” why the crime “according to it forms a whole”.
Another problem: the president “systematically rejected” the requests to note in the minutes of the debates certain “new elements”, such as two testimonies evoking “pressure” exerted by the investigators. This “testifies” for Gabriel Duménil of a “hostility to the defense”. A request for “additional information”, aimed at better understanding the presence of DNA from Grégory Wiart’s companion at the crime scene, was also rejected.